


Whumptober 2020

by Stairre



Category: The Transformers (Cartoon Generation One), The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Shattered Glass
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, Captivity, Chronic Pain, Cults, Dehumanization, Don't copy to another site, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Isolation, Lovecraftian Horror, Major Character Injury, Manipulation, Medical Experimentation, Mental Instability, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Other, Physical Abuse, Possession, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Ideation, There are no good guys in war, This is Whumptober - of course the tags are awful, Torture, Violence, War, War Crimes, Whump, Whumptober 2020, but also just
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:01:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 31
Words: 67,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26463091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stairre/pseuds/Stairre
Summary: It's that time again, everyone! Whumptober 2020 has arrived. Contained within are the 31 entries I wrote for this year's prompts. Each entry meets a 2k word minimum target (and some go over a little), so I can promise it's worth a look.There are the broadest tags possible out here, and in the beginning notes at the top of each page I've written down more detailed content warnings pertaining to that entry.Please read them.The continuities contained within are mostly G1 and IDW, with some Shattered Glass instalments scattered in for flavour. The characters tagged are POV or major characters, though some others appear in the background. There is a notable bias towards Hot Rod | Rodimus Prime and the characters that surround him. I do not apologise for this.There are also a lot of referenced canon pairings, or else vaguely-shippy undertones, but nearly nothing concrete enough to actually be able to tag the pairing. Included are: DriftRod, ThunderRod, GalvRod, MegaRod and DriftWing. Chapter titles make it easy to navigate to the appropriate parts.Please also note that this is rated Explicit forexplicit violencerather than forexplicit sexual content. Thank you and enjoy ❤
Comments: 144
Kudos: 138
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	1. Shackled | IDW | Deadlock + Hot Rod

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: captivity, non-consensual medical experimentation, background war and war crimes, implied dystopic society, restraints, prejudice and discrimination, ambiguous ending.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 1 : Let’s Hang Out Sometime  
** ****

**Waking Up Restrained | Shackled | Hanging**

–

**IDW Deadlock + Hot Rod**

–

“ _Shh!”_ comes a hissed voice, just as Deadlock’s sluggish sensor suite begins to come online. “For the love of Primus, _don’t draw their attention!”_ For all the voice is attempting to evoke a snapped order, the volume doesn’t raise above a murmur.

Deadlock obeys, playing it safe, muting his vocaliser against the full-frame ache and the pull of crude welds, lighting up his optics slowly.

For a moment, his visual feed doesn’t make sense. There’s a large room, blurry around the edges with lagging pixels, though sharpening steadily, and too-bright strip lights lining the floor, casting shadows up the walls, and there’s non-Cybertronian lifeforms wandering about, only they’re – ah.

He’s hanging suspended, upside-down, lightly swaying in thick chains securely attached to stasis cuffs clamped around multiple limbs, the thickest one around his middle.

None of the organic sentients are looking towards his direction, so Deadlock slowly turns his stiff neck towards the source of the voice: another Cybertronian, chained securely upside-down the same as him, blue optics dimmed to quarter-brightness in the half-lit room. He has a red helm, silver face, and the rest is hidden by his own cuffs and chains.

Fully able to take in silent cues, Deadlock dials his own red optics back down to match his companion’s, and unmutes his vocaliser to ask, whispery, “Status report?”

It doesn’t matter if the other mech is Autobot, Decepticon or Neutral. Deadlock’s lived too long in an army for the thought of using another question to catch up with the situation to even cross his processor. Luckily, the other mech barely blinks at the military phrase, twitching his head to turn another few degrees in Deadlock’s direction, his lips barely moving as he begins to murmur.

“Twenty-five to thirty hostiles, unknown location, some of their uniforms bear the emblem of the Black Block Consortia. Not seen any other Cybertronian ‘til you showed up – been here for, oh, three months? Thereabouts. Been in and out of stasis; they’re runnin’ some kinda experiments. I’m under ‘fore they even move me, so I’m still not sure what on. Ache like a slag-sucker after, though, so it ain’t good. Get ready for life upside-down, mech, ‘cause these stasis-cuffs are always turned up high.”

Deadlock absorbs that. It’s – not _great._ The Black Block Consortia _hates_ Cybertronians, and whatever horrendous things they might have planned do not bode well for anyone. “Chance of rescue?” he asks, because if escape is a long shot… but Deadlock doesn’t have that much hope; he’s _still_ not sure what he did that made Megatron assign him to Turmoil, but it means he’s no longer Decepticon High Command in the way that actually matters, no matter what the official ranks say.

(He, with the experience of several vorns, bites down on the ache that comes with that thought. What did he _do?_ Why was he sent away, assigned to fraggin’ _Turmoil?_ _)_

“If mine were comin’ for me, they’d’ve been here an’ gone by now,” the other mech says, a muted pain in his optics. “Grabbed me right off the battlefield, so I’m probably presumed K.I.A. You?”

Deadlock thinks of Turmoil and his _the weak are meat and the strong eat_ ethos (co-opted from an organic species, naturally, but understandable nonetheless), of the grinding campaign they had been in the middle of, the piles of corpses strewn across mecha-miles of battlefields. “Not high,” he admits. Saying the chance is actually about _zero_ is too much to bear, at the moment.

(Once, Deadlock had been a confidant of Megatron. Now, he’s nothing. His old friend won’t come, not for him. Not anymore.

_Megatron, please, just tell me what I did! I’ll do better; I can **fix it – )**_

The other mech nods, accepting, a faint light of hope extinguishing in his optics. “Was a long shot anyway,” he mutters. “But least one of us woulda gotten out. An’ this woulda ended for me.” He sees Deadlock’s look. “Autobot,” he says by way of explanation. “Saw your ‘Con badge ‘fore they chained you up.”

Deadlock grunts. It’s – once, he would have chafed at being mere metres away from an Autobot were he not trying to kill them at the time. But. The war’s been going for over three million years, and that’s a long fragging time, even for Cybertronians. Add the increasingly long list of dirty slag done on orders, the things Deadlock shutters his optics to because he _can’t afford to falter,_ and Turmoil’s – _everything –_ to that, and –

Deadlock hates Functionalism. Hated the Senate and the Council and the sneers and hands of the enforcers. But, by now, he thinks he might hate himself more.

“Name?” he asks instead, rather than spitting out anything he’s expected to say, like _Autobot scum_ or the like.

“Hot Rod,” replies the Autobot quietly, optics drawing away from Deadlock’s face at a sudden rise in the noise level of the talking going on below.

Deadlock doesn’t get the chance to decide whether or not to lie about his own unfortunately-famous name – and doesn’t he know the name Hot Rod from somewhere? He’s sure it rings a bell – before a pair of the organics below make their way over to the two Cybertronians.

One of them jabs a button on the wall and both Deadlock and Hot Rod grunt as their chains are suddenly dropped some with a clanking rattle, pulling taught again painfully as they descend, their helms now nearly scraping the tiled floor, their sensor-nets bombarding their HUDs with unhappy feedback. Deadlock unclenches his denta, twitching his helm finials. Frag, that _hurt._

“Do you think it will be compatible?” one of the organics asks the other, eyeing Deadlock up and down dismissively. “It is so different from the first.”

“It should be,” the second answers, glancing down at their data-pad and scrolling through something on the screen. “It’s the same species, after all, though I do wonder if they’re different sub-species. Their – _alt modes –_ are similar, so hopefully that will counter any incompatibility brought about by their – differences.”

_It._ Deadlock glances over to Hot Rod, but the carefully-blank look on his faceplates tells Deadlock all he needs to know. _They don’t even think of us as people._

“We can only try, I suppose,” says the first organic. They glance at Deadlock and Hot Rod, eyes flicking between the two as though cataloguing and comparing, before turning their head and calling to a third organic a little ways away. “Put our recent acquisition under. I want a full scan and physical taken for its records before we commence the experiment.”

The third organic nods in reply, leaning over a monitor and clacking on a keyboard. Within moments, Deadlock feels his sensor-net go swiftly numb, his systems slowing, his brain module lagging and becoming sluggish, as the dampening effect of the stasis cuffs is turned up.

He doesn’t even have the time to look at Hot Rod again before a forced stasis-lock is initiated.

–

Once again, it’s Hot Rod’s voice that pulls Deadlock from unconsciousness: “Hey, hey…” murmured softly.

His optics cycle up, dim, and his whole frame feels like he got shoved through a grinder and reassembled on the other side. A moan of pain would escape his vocaliser, but is prevented from doing so by the fact that it is locked offline by a foreign line of code – clumsy, not Cybertronian – in his processor. The medical port hidden amongst his neck cables aches as he notices it.

“Muted?” Hot Rod asks lowly, as Deadlock’s optics trail to him, his gyros still spinning. He’s chained upside-down still, higher up again, the heads of their organic captors visible in fragmenting pixels below.

Deadlock manages to nod a little, restraining a wince at the upset feedback from his balancing stabilisers at even that little motion.

“Me, too,” Hot Rod tells him. “Usually lasts about an hour after I wake up, but I guess it depends how long your firewalls take to root out the code. I think – ” He cuts himself off.

Deadlock hopes that the narrowing of his optics gets the message across clearly. _Tell me._

Hot Rod grimaces. “I could hear – screaming. Think that’s why they went to the effort of figuring out how to mute us. It’s not Cybertronian medical code, so – what they use for me mustn’t’ve worked on you without some changes.”

Deadlock pulls up his self-repair systems status in his HUD, and, yep, there it is; strain on the vocaliser and the inner walls of his oral intake. He hadn’t even felt it amongst all the rest of his aches.

He watches his processor’s firewalls attack the organic-code for a moment, trying to purge it from his systems with extreme prejudice, before he returns his attention to the outside. The organics are still milling about below, in this warehouse-like cell, an array of monitors, chairs, and filing cabinets at one end, like an office had spilt into the room.

Deadlock tries to judge whether having no proper containment cell is a good thing (less resources, lack of space, or whatever the reason), before he remembers that he and Hot Rod are fully secured effectively, and if there’s another room large enough to hold his frame whilst experiments are performed on his prone form, then they’re keeping the two of them chained to the ceiling for nothing but sheer spite and cruelty.

It’s not a nice thought, so he turns once more to Hot Rod.

Hot Rod’s looking at him, staring, and it’s a hungry expression. A _lonely_ expression. Deadlock raises an optical ridge. He can’t speak, but surely Hot Rod will be able to read lips. _“Three months?”_ he asks, doubtful.

Hot Rod smiles, bitter. “Three months in _this_ location,” he admits. “Not seen another mech for – I don’t know how long. An’ I’m not even just sayin’ that; I _don’t know.”_

Deadlock takes that in, and – it doesn’t exactly bode well for his own future. Part of him – that soft, aching part that he buried with Gasket – sort-of wants to reach out in comfort, to try and soothe the fear lurking behind Hot Rod’s optics. But even if it had been physically possible, Deadlock spent a long time conditioning himself out of that kind of behaviour, and he wouldn’t have.

(He doesn’t think he would have, at least. Or if so, then not right now. Maybe in the future – only – no, he doesn’t want to be here long enough that a continuance of this situation would constitute a _future.)_

“ _Miss home?”_ Deadlock mouths, and even he cannot tell whether it is practised cruelty or clumsy concern that makes him ask.

“Every day,” Hot Rod replies. “But home was lost three million years ago.”

Deadlock doesn’t reply to that, turning his optics away. He cranes his head to watch the Black Block Consortia members scurry about. Common Decepticon vernacular would have them compared to insects, but – they just look _busy._ Like a hanger crew prepping ships for lift-off. Deadlock can’t see their monitors from here, they’re all turned away, but one of them is leaning to the side and tilting theirs to show their neighbour something, and someone else is staring into a cup like it holds all the secrets of the universe, and yet another is standing at a photocopier and banging a hand on it irritably.

They just look like _people._ Going about their working day with two prisoners being held suspended in shackles on the other side of the room, not even hidden from view by any partition. The unthinking callousness is shocking, because the group are so obviously mostly-civilian, mostly non-combatants.

Deadlock is used to harshness, but – it’s so clear that he and Hot Rod are less than _animals_ to this group.

His optics trail back over to his companion. Hot Rod is hanging limp, not even struggling, not even tracking the movements of the organics. _Defeated._

A shiver goes down his spinal strut at the sight. How long will it be before Deadlock is the same?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, the first day of Whumptober dawns... 
> 
> Yes, I have completed all 31 days worth of entries (counting up at minimum 62k and likely more, so I had a busy September), so I now formally apologise to anyone subscribed to me personally who doesn't care for Whumptober, since you're about to get swamped with notifications about this fic. Sorry, guys. 
> 
> For those who don't know, each day has a theme, and each theme has three prompts to pick and choose and combine in any way you like. Any prompts that are not included in the entry are crossed out at the top. Chapter titles include one of the prompts, the verse, and the main character(s), for ease of navigation.
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	2. Collars | IDW | Minimus Ambus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: dehumanisation, kidnapping, sentient being kept as a pet, slave trade, medical torture, background dystopic society.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 2 : In The Hands Of The Enemy**

~~“ **Pick Who Dies”**~~ **| Collars | Kidnapped**

–

**IDW Minimus Ambus**

–

Forsaking all manners, Minimus snaps his denta at the hand reaching towards him, trying to bite the offending limb. His denta click shut, but it’s no use; quick reflexes have the mech whipping his hand away before Minimus can draw energon.

The mech laughs, mocking. “Aw, feisty one, aren’t ya?”

Minimus glares up at him, snarling, his mutilated vocaliser unable to form the words he wants to use, leaving only the animal sounds of his accursèd alt mode available to him.

He feels small without his load-bearer frame. The House of Ambus provided him with it when they took he and Dominus in all those thousands of years ago, and he’s barely been without it since. His irreducible form leaves him feeling utterly exposed; natural air has not hit this plating in – too long, perhaps, but if Minimus were to experiment with leaving his Ambus Armour, then he would not have chosen to do it like _this._

The mech gives a mocking coo, and says, “Bet we’ll get a nice price for ya. Unusual colours for a turbo-fox, very exotic. Makes ya feel special, huh?”

Minimus hisses at him. This mech knows full well that he’s not actually a turbo-fox.

It’s been – Primus, maybe a week? – since he was snatched right off the fragging street outside the municipal building where he worked as one of his brother’s senatorial team. A blaster levelled at him by a large flight frame with a mask on his face had had Minimus ducking into the transport quietly, co-operative the way they’d all been taught, certain at the time that this was just a group trying to get leverage on Dominus, or else just the House of Ambus. He had been _wrong._

“Now, now,” says the mech, waving a finger at Minimus, who is seized by the urge to bite it off, though the mech is carefully out of range and such a thing is impossible. “Don’t be like that. I’ve got muzzles back here, just for guys like you.”

Minimus subsides, his over-lapping plating still on end, making him look about twice the size he actually is, but he closes his mouth out of the bared snarl. The situation is bad enough already; he doesn’t need to be _muzzled_ on top of that.

They’d snatched him straight off the street, put him under with a stasis-lock inducer chip, and he’d woken up later, bereft of his Ambus Armour and trapped in his alt mode. His transformation cog had been surgically removed, and his vocaliser mutilated to prevent the use of sounds recognisable as Neo-Cybex.

It had been all so stream-lined, so practised, so callously cruel. This is not a one-off act of depravity – this is an organised ring.

Minimus wonders how many beast-formers have gone missing, victims of these – scoundrels. Far more than will have been reported, anyway. The enforcers don’t put out much effort for those they view as next-to-non-sentient; friends of anyone missing who tried to report such would be more likely laughed out the station than helped.

(Dominus is trying to change that. It’s like fighting uphill, like trying to stop a nuclear explosion with a single blast door, like trying to root out the Functionalism pervading every aspect of their society. If it’s working, it’s not working fast enough to have any noticeable difference.)

The mech smiles down at Minimus, and reaches in to pet him through the wide bars of the cage. Minimus tries to dodge, but the cage isn’t large, it’s just Minimus who is small. The mech’s fingers sink into his ruffled plating, and Minimus freezes, deeply desiring to lash out, but afraid to lose any possible future chance of escape to not being able to restrain himself now.

It feels awful. The mech pets him, dragging a hand down his back and scratching his audios, with a heavy but practised hand, and Minimus _hates it._ He is a _person!_ This mech has _no right to touch him!_

“Good boy,” the mech coos.

Minimus doesn’t think of himself as a hateful mech, but this might be the exception.

–

Minimus is brought in to see the kidnapping ring’s medic one last time before he – goes on sale. (Minimus is still trying not to think about that too hard).

The medic brings out a bunch of tools that look more suited to a workshop than a clinic, and then smirks down at Minimus as he explains.

“This,” he gestures to one of the tools, “is a handheld sander for metal. Those transformation seams of yours have got to go. Make you look too much like a person.”

_No,_ Minimus thinks in horror.

But it’s no use; the stasis cuffs built into the medical berth resist his attempts to struggle free. The mech turns up their power, and Minimus’ ambulatory systems power down, leaving him conscious but immobile.

“We’ve found that this type of pain helps keep you lot docile,” the mech says, faux-apologetically, his optics bright. “I’ll touch up your paint job when I’m done, don’t you fret. You’ll be the prettiest turbo-fox at the market.”

Minimus squeezes his optical shutters as tight as they will go when the sander descends upon him, bracing himself for the pain.

–

Minimus peers out of the bars of the cage, gazing upon the crowds at the interstellar market.

A wide variety of different sentient species are wandering about amongst the many market stalls, and Minimus’ sensitive audios are being assaulted by the loud noise of the crowds and sellers, the array of different languages cutting across each other, blurring together, and making understandable words practically impossible to tease out of the noise.

He’s not the only beast-former they’re selling. There’s a cyber-cat and a techno-hawk in adjacent cages to his, and by the way they act, they’re not true mechanimals. There _are_ some non-sentient creatures, to better disguise the ones that are fragging _people,_ but this particular stall is clearly exotic enough that they get away with not having huge amounts of – stock – and will still meet whatever financial sales target they’ve got.

Minimus wishes he could speak with them, but his comms have been removed, and even if he did know how to speak Hand, he hasn’t currently _got hands,_ so it’d be useless to him anyway.

A family comes up to the stall, an organic species with pale orange skin, large eyes for their faces, and tusks protruding from the corners of their mouths. There are four of them, clearly a family unit, two progenitors who look indulgent and two juveniles who look eager, tugging their creators along to peer in at Minimus and the others in their cages.

The disgusting mech who’s his _seller_ speaks to them, and Minimus’ translation programs fire up and get to work, trying to parse the unfamiliar language, but he doesn’t get enough of a sample before large hands are reaching into his cage and picking him up, wrapping one palm around his muzzle and lifting him with ease.

The collar around his neck keeps his systems lagging, unable to struggle through the numbness to put want into action. Minimus, therefore, hangs mostly passive in the mech’s hold.

The juveniles reach out to touch him, petting his head and pulling at his ears and tail. Minimus manages to make a discontented noise, not truly a growl, and one of the progenitors places a four-fingered hand on one of their progeny’s shoulders, speaking to them. The pulling stops, and an apologetic pat is rubbed onto Minimus’ head.

There’s more talking. Minimus watches the organic family, oblivious to the horror they’re being made complicit in, begin to negotiate a price. And then galactic credits are exchanged, Minimus is placed into a travelling cage, and he is handed over to his new… owners.

The juveniles poke fingers into his cage, stroking what they can reach, giggling to each other, and – Minimus is not a cruel mech. He does not bite. They’re only _new-sparks._

–

The collar does not come off. They must have been told not to, swallowed whatever lie the mech had given them. Minimus tries not to begrudge them for it.

The juveniles try his patience, but Minimus restricts himself to moving away from them when they get too touchy, sometimes leaping up to high shelves. They’re innocent, and do not deserve his denta or his claws.

The adults are easier to be around, and only try to stroke him occasionally. Sometimes, Minimus even lets them, wary of becoming the unloving pet who is better sold away than kept. At least this home is not unkind, bar the fact that he very much wants to escape back to his own.

(He wonders how Dominus is doing. How hard or how far he’s been searching. If he starts to wonder whether Dominus is searching at all, he tries to sternly tell himself to stop. His brother loves him. He _knows this.)_

The juveniles try to get him to sleep at the end of their soft berths, but Minimus leaps down and out of the room every time. He is not truly their loving pet, and while their sad faces tug at his spark, he knows that if _he_ found out that a mechanimal he had let into his berth was instead a sapient beast-former, he’d feel violated in some way. So, no. No curling up at the end of their soft fabric covers.

The collar has a ring on it, and to it a lead is attached. He is taken out for a walk twice a day; in the morning on this strange organic planet around the block, and in the evening out to a park, where long fronds of succulent flora waver in the breeze and caress his plating as his leash is extended, though never removed fully, letting him wander mostly-free for a time.

It’s not – the _worst,_ Minimus supposes. He could be in a far worse situation than a family’s beloved pet. He could, of course, also be in a better one: back on Cybertron, his transformation cog and vocaliser restored, trailing around after his spark-brother and nagging at him to get his paperwork done properly, don’t you know this next meeting is _important,_ Dominus?

His translation programs, fortunately, have caught up by now, so he understands what his new – owners – are saying. One of the progenitors works for a bank, and the other as a mentor, of sorts, for juveniles of the species, in what appears to be a structured teaching program of sorts, like the ones new-sparks get put through. (Like the ones new-sparks with _acceptable alts_ get put through).

(Unfortunately, the first words Minimus learnt with any sort of surety comprised of _sit_ and _roll over, heel_ and _fetch._ He feels humiliated and demeaned, doing _tricks_ for the reward of energon treats obviously specially-bought for their exotic pet. He supposes that, from the niceness of the house (to his admittedly unfamiliar optics), and the progenitor who works for a bank, this family is comfortable, with credits to spare.

Perhaps that made them the prime targets for that hideous ring. Nicely-off organics with too little familiarity to recognise the difference between a mechanimal and a mechanimal alt. Though, to be fair, with his transformation seams – gone – Minimus wouldn’t put shanix on most Cybertronians realising the truth.

As far as pet owners go, there’s nothing wrong with this family. They’re kind and patient and loving. Minimus is just _not a pet.)_

One of the juveniles wanders over and strokes his back. “Night-night,” they say, yawning, showing off their little tusks, not yet grown in properly. It’s getting late, and the progenitors are shuffling their offspring off to berth. Thankfully, neither of the two young ones tries to take Minimus with them this time.

The light turns off in the room, the last progenitor ducking out and closing the door, Minimus’ optics adjusting for the change instantly, his turbo-fox alt useful for _some_ things.

Minimus laps up diluted energon from a bowl on the floor, pads over to a windowsill where a cushioned pet-bed has been set up, settles down inside it, and stares up at the night sky full of foreign stars.

He aches to go home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Minimus, baby :'(
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	3. Forced To Their Knees | G1 | Ultra Magnus + Cyclonus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: background war, past slavery, captivity, restraints, abuse of a prisoner, the Quintessons (who are their own warning).

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 3 : My Way Or The Highway**

**Manhandled | Forced To Their Knees | Held At Gunpoint**

–

**G1 Ultra Magnus + Cyclonus**

–

Ultra Magnus rises up from his seat on the floor of his cell when he hears the door to the room open with a metallic click and voices approach. He has been alone so far, all the other cells in the Quintesson compound empty, but it seems that he’s about to get some company.

There’s a scraping sound, metal on metal, like a mech being dragged, and – lo and behold, it is. A pair of Sharkticon guards – Ultra Magnus is still quietly disconcerted by them, they look so much like they _could_ be Cybertronian, like they’re a first draft for one – walk into view and – oh.

It’s _Cyclonus._

The unconscious Decepticon second-in-command is being dragged along the ground by a variety of chains wrapped around him, one sensor horn missing entirely and his wings dented all out of shape. Ultra Magnus winces a little at the sight, even though Cyclonus is his enemy. That has got to _hurt._

The Sharkticons throw Cyclonus unceremoniously into the cell directly opposite Ultra Magnus’, sliding the fettered front shut and initiating the plasma charge that runs through the bars. They don’t even bother to unchain the mech. Then they snigger to each other, grin at Ultra Magnus with their huge sharp denta, and leave. The sound of the door sliding shut again feels a little too final for Ultra Magnus’ tastes.

Ultra Magnus observes Cyclonus as best he can from his limited view. His enemy is in stasis-lock for definite, though he doesn’t appear to be bleeding out from anywhere. Ultra Magnus wonders how the Quintessons managed to subdue him; Cyclonus is a warrior of deadly calibre, and his frame is built of Unicron besides. That lethal skill combined with a truly terrifying array of physical capabilities has long made Cyclonus a feared enemy, right from the first moments of the Unicronian Triad’s rule.

It’s strange, really, seeing him brought so low. Ultra Magnus had been quietly uncertain as to whether anything _could_ bring down – however temporarily – one of the Unicronians. Something distinctly un-Cybertronian runs in their lines and circuits; it’s most clear in Galvatron, and the way he gets up long past the point where he should stay down.

He supposes he should feel grateful for proof that Cyclonus can be knocked into stasis-lock just like any other mech, but all he feels is disquieted. It feels like he’s seeing something unnatural, forbidden. There is no part of the Cyclonus that Ultra Magnus fights on a semi-regular basis that hints at even the barest possibility of vulnerability, though logic dictates that the mech surely recharges at some point.

Ultra Magnus runs his optics over Cyclonus’ battered frame, lingering on the missing sensory horn and the twisted wings. His own abduction had been quite violent, and Ultra Magnus wishes that they had not caught him so much by surprise. He might have made a better showing of himself, otherwise. At least it looks like Cyclonus put up a hell of a fight.

–

“Magnus.”

The voice cuts through the light half-recharge Ultra Magnus was dozing in. He jerks up, systems trying to bring battle programming online, his integrated weapons whirring in failure as the lock on them prevents their switching from _offline_ to _active_. It’s only instinct by now when that voice cross-references to his memory banks as belonging to _the enemy._

“Bzzhh – Cyclonus?” Ultra Magnus gets out, his vocaliser lagging still. He’d taken a nasty hit to the neck during his abduction, and his self-repair systems haven’t got the spare energon to prioritise his vocaliser. Thankfully, it’s just lag so far, though if it stays unfixed, it will deteriorate further.

He looks up, blue optics meeting the smouldering red ones focused on him, staring across the corridor from their cell into his. Cyclonus looks – terrible, actually. He’s managed to get himself upright despite the decreased mobility due to his chains, leaning against the back wall and sitting on the floor, but he really does look like someone shoved him into a mech-sized blender before dumping his dented frame back out with no sense of courtesy.

“Quintessons?” Cyclonus asks wryly.

“Yes,” Ultra Magnus replies. “How did they manage to get the drop on _you?”_

“Sheer numbers,” Cyclonus says. “Have they made any demands?”

“Not that I know of,” Ultra Magnus sighs. “I’ve been stuck down here for – a week, maybe?” His captors have not had the courtesy to dim the stark lights in any semblance of a day/night cycle, and his internal chronometer has been glitching ever since the foreign code locked half his systems offline. Cybertronian code and Quintesson code have clearly diverged at some point during the intervening years of their separation.

“Nine days,” Cyclonus clarifies. “That is how long you have been missing.”

Ultra Magnus pauses, stares. Cyclonus looks back, steady, unperturbed.

“I didn’t realise you were keeping track,” Ultra Magnus says, finally.

Cyclonus tilts his head, and for all it’s a standard piece of body language, he somehow manages to evoke the impression of a turbohawk sizing someone up more than he does simply look like a mech with a cocked helm. “Of course we keep track of you,” he says. “Lord Galvatron dislikes not knowing the status of the Prime and his vanguard.”

Okay, yeah, this is just another symptom of Galvatron’s obsession with Rodimus, then –

“I concur with him on this,” Cyclonus adds.

Ultra Magnus stares. He can’t help it. Then he reminds himself that Cyclonus is loyal to Galvatron above all else, and enables him in whatever whim comes to the Decepticon leader’s plasma-fried processor. “Do you have any news of the Autobots?” he asks, wanting to change the topic, knowing that Cyclonus might feed him misinformation (though such is hardly his style) but unable to _not_ at least try.

“Your Prime made contact with my lord in the hours after your abduction, demanding your return,” Cyclonus informs him. “When it became clear that your disappearance was not a Decepticon operation, intel was exchanged regarding possible culprits and the Quintessons were quickly narrowed down as the guilty party. There have been Quintesson attacks upon both armies in the days since, and a temporary cease-fire has been agreed to better rid ourselves of the threat they pose. I was leading a mixed sabotage team at the time that I was captured – as far as I know, all others made it out alive.”

“I leave Rodimus unsupervised for a week and everything goes sideways,” Ultra Magnus says, wry, wanting to inject some quiet humour into the situation. Galvatron agreeing to, however temporarily, stop launching himself at Rodimus at any given opportunity? Ultra Magnus should probably be searching the sky for the return of Unicron.

Cyclonus somehow gives off the impression of smiling without his lips actually doing so. “Quite so.”

But the lighter tone they managed to create is dashed by the sound of the door to the prison cells sliding open. Ultra Magnus and Cyclonus both shut up immediately, going tense and ready. Cyclonus still can’t really move, but Ultra Magnus gets up to stand – he refuses to stay down and look _up_ at his captors. One of his hip struts is still aching, probably still partially dislocated, even, but he straightens his spinal strut and squares his shoulder pauldrons, arranging his face into a stern frown. Maybe it’s not actually doing much to change the situation, but it certainly makes Ultra Magnus feel better.

A Quintesson followed by four Sharkticon guards trails in, and Ultra Magnus still can’t get the initial description Rodimus gave him years ago out of his head:

“ _They looked like, like, like_ _ **floating eggs,**_ _Magnus! With thin tentacles trailing down and_ _ **five faces**_ _that they switched between. No, stop looking at me like that, I_ _ **swear**_ _this is true. Kup will back me up.”_

Years of clashing with their accursèd creators later, Ultra Magnus still silently concurs with Rodimus’ account of the looks of the Quintesson Judges.

“Look at these guilty prisoners,” one of the faces says.

“Or are they innocent?” says another.

“You know as well as I do that the fate you deal out is the same no matter the verdict,” Ultra Magnus says.

A third face laughs. Ultra Magnus could truly go ten million years without hearing a Quintesson laugh again, and it would still be too soon.

“Seize him,” the first face says again. “Put him down on his knees.”

The Sharkticon guards open the cell door, blasters already pointing at Ultra Magnus, and – he doesn’t risk it. The Sharkticons’ armour is of inferior make, easily punctured by photon charges or the like, but what they lack in blaster fire resistance, they make up for in sheer physical strength and weight. Sharkticons are almost a joke up until the moment that they get too close, and then they’re the ones laughing. Those denta and claws are _nasty._

Ultra Magnus lets himself get prodded down by the gun barrels, kneeling on the floor of his cell, the four Sharkticons surrounding him. The Quintesson Judge hovers closer, those thin tentacles reaching up to caress the side of his helm.

Ultra Magnus glares up. He hasn’t missed the imagery of being forced to kneel before his species’ ex-masters.

“Good, good…” the Quintesson Judge croons. “Now, Ultra Magnus, you will _comply.”_

Ultra Magnus doesn’t get the chance to ask what he’s complying with before another Quintesson enters the room, coming up behind the first. Behind them, a floating transmission screen is recording everything, and Ultra Magnus can see that it is displaying a feed of what he recognises as the main control centre in Autobot City. Rodimus is on the screen, and the blur of green behind him must be Springer.

“As you can see, Rodimus Prime,” the second Quintesson says, “your beloved Magnus is right here. Alive, as we said. Tell me… what are you willing to pay for his safe return?”

On the screen, a look of banked fury crosses Rodimus’ face as he takes in the position Ultra Magnus is in.

Ultra Magnus grimaces. At least Rodimus is mostly safe. And it’s nice to know that the Quintessons still value money above pretty much all else. They’re a manipulative, deceptive, slaver species, but as long as what they _really_ want is known, they can be worked around. Mostly.

“Do not trust them!” Cyclonus barks from the other cell, surely out of Rodimus’ view. “The Quintessons have proven time and time again that they will not honour any agreement made. If you pay for Magnus’ return, you’ll end up getting his corpse.”

“Silence!” one of the Quintessons shrieks, the hovering monitor turning to follow them as they move to the front of Cyclonus’ cell, the chained form of the Decepticon second-in-command now surely being caught on the camera feed and transmitted directly to Autobot HQ. “Filthy Unicronian stain, you _will_ be silent! Your triad’s days are _numbered!”_

Cyclonus narrows his optics. “I will enjoy watching you try to force my lord to be silent,” he says.

You know what? Ultra Magnus would enjoy such a sight, too. The very notion of one of the Judges trying to tell _Galvatron_ to sit down and shut up is so ridiculous that he has to swiftly mute his vocaliser to prevent a snort from escaping. From the laugh that sounds from the monitor, he is not the only one who finds that image humorous.

One of the Sharkticons presses the barrel of the gun hard into the back of Ultra Magnus’ helm, and his humour evaporates instantly. This is not a laughing matter, and the situation is pretty dire. The Quintessons can’t be trusted to keep their word on anything, and they execute people for _fun._ It doesn’t matter that Ultra Magnus is a powerful warrior – the Quintessons won’t make it a fair fight.

And, well, a gun is a gun is a gun. Anyone can shoot one. Ultra Magnus hopes that rescue will arrive before some Sharkticon gets the order to fire, though. At this point, he’ll take even Galvatron blasting his way in…

There’s the sound of an explosion from somewhere else in the facility, the Quintessons startling in place, and _Ultra Magnus knows that sound._

What is that human phrase? Speak of the Devil and he shall appear?

On the other side of the room, Cyclonus begins to laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're feeling hints of pre-GalvRod in the background... I may be somewhat predictable.
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	4. Buried Alive | IDW | Megatron

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: war, war crimes, dystopic society, character being buried alive (or nearly buried) multiple times, implied genocide, non-graphic torture of a prisoner of war, functionalism (which is basically robot fascism) and implied PTSD.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 4 : Running Out Of Time**

**Caged | Buried Alive | Collapsed Building**

–

**IDW Megatron**

–

Megatron onlines his optics to darkness.

This is not, in itself, particularly alarming. Megatron is a miner; the darkness is his home. No, what makes panic rise is the weight on his back, the feedback from his proximity sensor pings, and the thick dust lining the insides of his vents.

He does not make the mistake of ex-venting hard, the way he instinctually wants to, to rid himself of the clogging in his filters. To do so would only disturb the dust more, potentially worsening his situation, so he restrains the urge with a harsh mental grip – Megatron prides himself on his control – and instead brings up his scanners.

The information they bring back isn’t good. Megatron’s trapped under the collapsed mine shaft, over two mecha-miles below the surface, and there are no life signs around him.

Megatron grimaces, swallowing back the urge to purge his tanks. Within the rocks around him, the grey and cooling corpses of his fellow miners must be trapped, their frames crushed and their sparks guttered. He sends up a prayer of thanks that Impactor was assigned to a different shaft today. At least his friend is not one of the corpses surrounding him.

Megatron is alive by sheer luck; the rubble has pinned him down, but not fully, trapping him in a small hole. His legs are stuck, but not crushed, else he would have bled out by now, but Megatron won’t be able to get out without help, for fear of moving the debris wrong and causing further collapses in the mine shaft.

He tries his comm. Nothing but static. Fragging _great._

Megatron sets up his systems to send out a ping on a timer, and then, with nothing else that he can do, he manually falls into a power-saving stasis-lock. He can only hope that he will wake again.

–

The Decepticons are rioting throughout Tesarus, the Senate’s Autobot enforcers becoming overwhelmed, and Megatron is snapping orders into the command line, relying on Starscream, Soundwave, Deadlock, and a few others to see them through.  
  


Commanding an army – and that’s what they are by now, and sometimes Megatron is still startled by that, when he walks amongst his people, those who have chosen him, and sees the reverence in their optics – is still new to him, but he’s found that he has an abundance of natural talent, with the experience of some who have chosen him – the Senate hardly respects war-frames any more than they respect miners, and they have a wealth of knowledge they are eager to hand over to Megatron – supporting him and the Decepticon cause.

(Honestly, what did they think was going to eventually happen? They oppress war-frames and miners and labourers and all the frame types with naturally dangerous builds, those who have bulk and strength and thick armour, and they expect there to be no dangerous consequence for pushing them all the way to the brink? Complete _idiocy._ Then again, you _do_ have to be an uncaring, cruel idiot to believe in something as blatantly incorrect and immoral as _functionalism.)_

So here Megatron is, fighting for his rights, for _all_ their rights, and the Functionists are never going to be defeated by _peaceful protests,_ so guess what? The Decepticons will give them _riots_ until the Senate gives them _rights._ And they _won’t stop_ until they _have them._

Join the Decepticons: punch a fascist today!

Megatron keeps one audio on the comm and one optic on the live battle map scrolling through his HUD, courtesy of Laserbeak and Buzzsaw flying above Tesarus and feeding the command team live action footage. They’re too small for the Senate’s Autobots to really notice from the ground, let alone pick out as a target worthy of being shot down. Not while there are all the seekers and other flight frames in the air, providing much more promising targets.

Typical Functionists – utterly dismissive of the true value of those they think beneath them. Well, joke’s on them; Laserbeak and Buzzsaw are _integral_ to the Decepticons’ strategy. The streak of tactical victories already won prove the importance of their pivotal placement in the skies.

Megatron ducks underneath a half-collapsed building – and, okay, maybe this is less a _riot_ than it is an _occupation,_ but the Senate _will_ lose Tesarus by the end of this campaign, Megatron is determined – and takes a moment to reload his blaster. His fusion cannon is hot and smoking on his arm, but the capacitor banks that feed directly into it need more time to refill before he can use it again. Hence, the blaster. Megatron is not fool enough to walk around making himself a huge target with only one weapon, after all, no matter how terrifying that weapon may be.

Then there’s a high-pitched whine of a failing engine, and one of the seekers falls from the sky, trailing smoke and fire, frame already greying, and directly hits the building Megatron is in. In a rush of shattering glass and groaning metal, the remains of the upper floors cave in entirely, and Megatron is forced down by the weight, knocked into temporary unconsciousness.

It’s only a couple of kliks before he comes to, not long enough for the command channel to have missed him. Megatron’s armour has had significant upgrades since the time he was just another mass-produced miner, and while he’s sore, none of the armour plates have been compromised. He’ll definitely be feeling the strain in his gears in a few hours, but right now, he’s more aware of the _weight_ than anything.

_Now why is this familiar?_ Megatron thinks sardonically. He carefully sets out his scanners to tell him what’s what, before he rises from his forced kneeling position, shrugging off the weight of about three collapsed floors with only a grunt to show for the effort.

Tiny shards of crystal glass scatter to the floor around his pedes with a rush of clinking sounds, what little light filtering through the smog and smoke above glinting on them. So many little lives fallen to the ground before him, shattered beyond repair.

For all that he is a poet, the metaphor is lost on him.

–

Megatron yells out a wordless shriek of fury, roaring at Optimus Prime as he retreats from the battlefield, firing at the fleeing Autobots, striking some and missing others. The drone of missiles echoes overhead, the skies dark with thick smoke, sometimes the glint of a wing peaking through the clouds before disappearing once again.

“ _Curse you, Prime!”_ Megatron swears, before clicking onto the battle channel and calling for a general retreat. It was just like Optimus to get the local organics to do his dirty work for him, Megatron fumed. Now they would all have to clear the planet before the threatened hydrogen bomb came to pass.

The sound of whining missiles falls quiet, though the smoke doesn’t clear yet. There isn’t a lot of wind on this planet. Megatron can hear the unit commanders barking for their mechs to haul the heavy artillery back into the transports, hissing at them not to give chase to the retreating Autobots, no matter how tempting, do you want to be left behind?

Megatron growls under his breath, stalking back towards where the ships are, Decepticons scattering in his wake. There’s a time limit and he’s not arrogant enough to miss it. _Ugh, organics,_ he scowls. _We’re on the other side of the planet from their settlements, they’ve not got a single casualty._

He steadfastly ignores the fact that this has been the case several times before, and, inevitably, the fighting always expands to envelope the innocents in residence before the Autobots and Decepticons are done with the planet. It’s generally about a fifty-fifty chance which side will end up involving them first – the Autobots are no more innocent of occasionally occupying and then exploiting the resources of the natives than the Decepticons are, it’s a _war_ after all, and hard choices have to be made – but this time the organics decided to drive them off first before it could happen.

A part of Megatron grudgingly respects them for it; telling both he and Optimus to get lost takes no small amount of ball bearings, especially with the destruction they’d been sowing so enthusiastically before this planet’s government had laid down the ultimatum. Another part of him is just annoyed at having his battle with Optimus interrupted.

The shells both sides have been using has left the ground pockmarked and weak, liable to crumble beneath pedes. Megatron nearly goes down one such sinkhole, the layers of weakened rock crumbling into a cavern beneath his pedes, but he catches himself on the side with a show of bared denta, pulling himself free. Pebbles skitter into the darkness below.

“Sir?” one of his Decepticons asks. He’s an officer, but Megatron will be damned to the Pit before he remembers his name. “Are you all right?”

“Fine!” Megatron snarls. “Get me a ship, an ETA for our evacuation, and stop asking useless questions!” He stalks off.

Behind him, the jaw of the sinkhole gapes open wide, broken rocks like teeth.

–

_It’s over,_ Megatron thinks. He cannot tell whether he is angry, relieved, or numb.

He’s still in stasis-cuffs, a wall of bars electrified with plasma in front of him, and Optimus’ ashamed retreating back is getting farther away. Not even the spiteful warmth of having successfully goaded the _esteemed_ and _moral_ leader of the Autobots into participating in a bit of light torture manages to buoy him up. It should feel like a victory, if only a moral one, proof that Optimus Prime isn’t as squeaky-clean as he wants to seem, but the taste on his glossa is only bitter.

Megatron wonders what will happen now.

He’s – lost his way. He _knows_ that. The Decepticons are far from what they once were, and so is he. _He,_ who once preached peace, then violence, and then _genocide._

Megatron shutters his optics. The Functionists were never going to be removed without violence. He accepts that. _Optimus_ accepts that. But – he went too far, continued on past the point of sanity, past the point of morality, past the point where _he had already won._

_Can I put down my cannon?_ Megatron wonders, as he stares at the bars, feeling every inch of his sore frame, his non-lethal wounds protesting. He doubts any medic will be by to see him in any hurry. _Will I be able to?_

If his past self could see him now, the one whose hands knew the pickaxe more than they knew the blaster, the one who laughed and drank with Impactor, the one who wrote poetry on contraband data-pads because miners weren’t supposed to be able - allowed - to read… he would turn away in shame.

He’d wanted freedom. He’d gotten it, for a time, before his own choices caged him into a world of hideous violence. _Death,_ Megatron remembers a dozen, a thousand, a million battlefield chants. _Death, death, death._

Megatron thinks that he might prefer death, but Optimus won’t give it to him. At least, not before he’s been put through some farce of a trial. He’s guilty as can be, but there’s a _procedure_ for these things.

Megatron wonders if Optimus would be willing to then turn his _justice_ upon his own mecha, his filthy and stained Autobots. He wonders if it even matters, if anything matters any more.

There are forty-six bars on the cage. Megatron counts them, one by one, the way he once counted mattocks on the rack, or the amount of shanix he needed to pay his rent, or the syllables in the lines of his poetry in order to keep the cadence right. It’s a way of centering himself, one he hasn’t changed since the day he rolled off the line and got shoved in the direction of the dark tunnels underneath Cybertron. Counting things gives them a quantifiable number, something that doesn’t change by itself.

But people aren’t quantifiable; that was what Megatron spent four million years fighting for, fighting for it so long and so hard that he forgot what it actually meant under a wave, a flood, a sea, of battle reports and tactical plans, lives reduced to numbers. A statistical point, unchanging.

Megatron shutters his optics. Can _he_ change?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen, okay, the complexity of IDW Megatron makes me _feel things._
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	5. Rescue | IDW | Wing + Drift

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: restraints, torture of a prisoner, talk of religion and religious cults, implied psychological torture, trauma, severe injury, background war.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 5 : Where Do You Think You’re Going?**

**~~On The Run~~ | ~~Failed Escape~~ | Rescue**

–

**IDW Wing + Drift**

–

It’s too bright when Wing wakes up.

He shutters his optics against the light, grimacing, his HUD scrolling through a long list of systems wanting his attention, starting with his self-repair and ending with his low fuel tanks. Everything hurts, the pain centred in his chest, in his spark chamber.

_That’s right,_ he remembers, the memory files opening at his request. _I was run through._

His chest aches terribly; Wing doesn’t think he’s ever felt a pain quite like this. He’s been hurt before, of course, by simple accidents, in training, or else in the course of his work (sanctioned by Dai Atlas or not) as a Knight, but – his spark chamber has never been compromised before, and Wing is finding that it’s an indescribable type of pain. His eternal spark came close – so close, _too close –_ to being extinguished directly, and spark injuries are the worst type. Limbs can be rebuilt, lines replaced, even brain modules can be repaired by specialists (though they’re still a grievous wound), but sparks?

Wing supposes that he’s lucky that only his chamber was pierced, not his Primus-given distillation of self. Only one of those you can come back from, and even then not smoothly.

_Primus,_ he _hurts._

The last thing Wing remembers is the dark purple sneering face of the organic with cybernetic implants, the leader of the slavers who have been plaguing the surrounding systems for centuries. Braid, his name is, if Wing recalls correctly. He’s wanted by the Inter-Planetary Peacekeepers for a whole host of crimes that would make anyone shiver to merely read the list.

Braid, in league with the mech Drift had called _Lockdown._ It’s – not good, really not good. Wing doesn’t get to hear much news outside of the surrounding few systems to Theophany, but if Drift – who knows far more of the wider state of the known galaxies – says Lockdown is _dangerous,_ is _one of the worst mecha you’ll ever encounter,_ is _utterly amoral, even hardened ‘Cons are wary,_ then they should all be rather concerned.

The thought hits Wing harshly. _Drift!_ Where is he? Is he safe? … Is he alive?

And, for that matter, where is _he?_ Wing is in a brightly-lit cell – it is _unmistakeably_ a cell – and cuffed directly to the back wall with what must be bands that retract directly into it, arms and legs spread out, standing but secured. There’s no bars, just a door, the strip lights, the empty room, and Wing.

Wing vents in, cycling through in steady counts, meditative. He’s dented and dirty and his chest armour is gaping open, the light of his spark producing a slight glow. He feels horribly exposed, but – there’s nothing he can do about it. Not before his captors come for him.

He settles in to wait.

–

“So, you’re one of Dai Atlas’ little sycophants,” says Lockdown, standing before Wing. The mech is large, and looks almost mismatched, his frame has so many alien technologies grafted on to it. One of his hands has been replaced with this awful serrated hook, like Lockdown took the hideous act that was empurata and repurposed it as his own. Wing tries not to look at the thing, meeting Lockdown’s optics steadily.

“Dai Atlas has no patience for sycophancy,” Wing replies, “or anyone who cannot think for themselves. Or, oh, any _system_ that teaches people not to think for themselves. It’s a big thing with him.”

Lockdown smiles at him. “And yet even the Prime decries the Circle of Light as a cult.”

Wing raises an optical ridge. He does, in fact, remember the start of the war quite clearly; as a long-time student, and later friend, of Dai Atlas’, he was there the day after Shockwave had shot his leader to keep him from attending the Senate meeting, was there when war broke out in the streets, was there when Dai Atlas turned to his companions and said to gather up everyone who didn’t want to fight, because they were _leaving._

“He does; he didn’t particularly like Dai Atlas refusing to let him use the Circle as a propaganda and recruitment force for the Autobots,” Wing answers. “And, considering that he not only brushed off all the religious aspects of being a Prime, but also spent millennia enforcing the rule of the Senate – despite being proud of being a _good enforcer –_ Dai Atlas refuses to acknowledge him as a true Prime. The Prime is the leader of the people, and Optimus Prime made it clear that he would not fight to reconcile, but simply _to win._ Hence, we’re a cult, not a fully voluntary religious order.”

Lockdown laughs, surprised. “Not a high opinion, then?”

“Optimus Prime told Dai Atlas that _‘Til All Are One_ means not all Cybertronians living in harmony, but that all are equal in the optics of the Matrix,” Wing says. “Whether the Matrix revealed this to him or not, one interpretation does not invalidate the other. The Prime wants _peace,_ but if he would rather win it through martial victory, then it will be no true peace. No _oneness._ Dai Atlas used to be quite well acquainted with him – Orion Pax certainly hung around Senator Shockwave enough – and he says that he was always a bit _my way or the highway._ Placing a mech like that in a position of power is a dangerous game to play.”

“Well, you _do_ have some things to say,” Lockdown muses. “Though I suppose you’ll be less forthcoming if I asked you where your _city_ is?”

“If you don’t know already, then it won’t be my glossa that spills it,” Wing says. It’s – good news, actually. New Crystal City is still hidden, the many civilians there safe from Lockdown and Braid and their combined awfulness. He hopes that Drift is among them.

“Such a pity,” Lockdown sighs, theatrically, his optics brightening slightly. His hooked hand rises up to hover in front of Wing’s chest, the vulnerable spark playing its golden light across it. “You have a pretty frame, you know. Be a shame to have to break it.”

“Things break,” Wing replies steadily, relaxing his frame. Bracing himself too tightly will only make it hurt more. “People are not things.”

Lockdown bites out a laugh. “Knew you lot couldn’t be Functionists. Deadlock wouldn’t have been caught dead with you if you were. Still, money is money, and Megatron pays.”

“His name,” Wing corrects, optics narrowed, “is Drift.”

“Deadlock, Drift, what does it matter?” Lockdown scoffs. “Megatron wants him, so Megatron’ll get him. Just as soon as you tell me where your little settlement is.”

When Lockdown pries part of Wing’s chest armour off with the hook he caught in the breach already made, Wing mutes his vocaliser so that he doesn’t scream.

–

Wing’s on a ship, he’s figured out. It’s in orbit, its engines off so he can’t feel the rumble of them beneath his pedes, but Wing’s a flight frame with systems designed for manoeuvring through the sky, processing multiple vectors at once, and orienting himself correctly in them. He can pick up, beyond the artificial gravity of the ship, the changes in angle and position the orbit induces.

His chest is still gaping open, wider than before, and his front is stained with dried pink energon. None of his wounds are lethal, just _painful._ Leaving his spark exposed is a strategy to make him feel vulnerable, even more than being cuffed to the wall is, and it’s working. Wing just doesn’t let it influence his decision to keep his vocaliser muted.

The lights in the room never dim or turn off, another psychological tactic to make Wing feel like he’s been here longer than he has. His internal chronometer is still functional, though, and he knows it’s been three days by the standard cycle of Theophany. Lockdown visits twice a day, generally for around a couple of hours each time, but the bounty hunter seems to prefer psychological torture to physical, though Wing has more than enough compounding agonies in his frame to prove the mech a master at both. Wing switches off his audios during the sessions, knowing that the best way to resist is to simply not engage as much as possible. He doesn’t want to hear Lockdown’s venomous spewings anyway.

Lockdown doesn’t like that very much, and doesn’t hesitate to make his displeasure known, but Wing has thousands of innocent lives hanging in the balance of his control, and the thought of them is not yet worn out enough to fail to rely on. _The spark is strong, though the frame be fallible_ is the saying, and while Wing doesn’t necessarily agree with the letter of the phrase, he can agree with the spirit.

On the fourth day, some time after the first visit and hours before the second, the whole ship rocks in place with the sound of an explosion.

Wing’s head jerks up, watching the door. He has no idea where Lockdown has positioned the ship, and the forced boarding could be pirates, could be Peacekeepers, could be anything in between.

The door opens, and Drift stalks in, a smoking blaster in his hand, his face drawn into a concentrated look. For one moment, Wing’s memory files overlay his blue optics with red, his white and red paint with dark grey and gold, but then the moment vanishes, and Drift is lowering the gun, hurrying up to him.

“Wing,” he says, and his optics catch and stare on the golden spark exposed to the room, utterly unprotected. Wing’s not a particularly shy mech, but – sparks are _intimate._ You only show yours to either a medic or someone you love and trust with your very essence. Wing can’t deny that he has played with the thought of maybe, one day, he and Drift showing each other theirs, but even in his most ridiculous fantasies, the place was somewhere far in the nebulous future.

“Drift,” Wing says, putting a smile on his face, ignoring how it stretches the cut bisecting jaggedly down through his left cheek plates and one side of his lips, curling down his chin and chipping the metal kibble there. “Lockdown?”

“Gone,” Drift snarls, his sharp denta bared. One hand touches Wing’s arm, tracing the cuff, more gently than Wing has felt from Drift before. “Fraggin’ _coward_ cut and run when he saw Dai Atlas come swinging a sword at him; took one of the escape pods. Musta modified it ‘cause it sure was fast. Axe is tracking him now, but if they pursue it’s Atlas’ decision.”

Wing just nods, trying to think of something to say, but – he’s tired. He’s hurt and hungry and he wants to get home. Seven sessions of torture with an experienced sadist like Lockdown is _not fun,_ no matter what one may or may not have been trained for. And – Wing knows how to fight, knows how to take pain, but torture? Torture resistance was _not_ part of the Knight training, though communicating with victims of it was. Wing’s unsure whether that was arrogance or wishful thinking on Dai Atlas’ part, but it doesn’t really matter now. It’s over.

_It’s over._

Drift speaks into his comm, but Wing doesn’t hear. His mind, so wound up, bristled with defences and determination for the past four days, finally ex-vents, and it feels like his thoughts have gone blurry, pixelating like a damaged visual feed.

Then there’s someone else there, large, and, oh, Wing knows this EM field. Dai Atlas. Dai Atlas is here, placing his large hands on Wing’s face, tilting it up so their optics meet, Drift hovering in the background by Dai Atlas’ elbow. Wing should be looking at Dai Atlas, he really should, but he watches Drift instead, numbly, distantly.

They speak to each other, something else happens, and then Redline’s EM field touches Wing’s, and he raises his head to see the medic staring in horror at the mess of his torso. Redline gestures to Dai Atlas and Drift, and then the cuffs retract into the wall and Wing is slumping forward. They are quick to catch him, to hold his brutalised front carefully away from their own anterior kibble, keeping his spark safe.

Dai Atlas, Wing’s trusted and chosen leader, carries him out of the torture cell. But it’s Drift, his chosen student, who twines his fingers in Wing’s and holds his hand the entire way back to the rescue shuttle. He even modulates his EM field to project comfort over the top of his roiling rage.

Wing is so proud of him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Adele voice* _We could have had it aaallll!_
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	6. "Stop, please..." | IDW | Rung

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: dystopic society, forced/non-consensual medical experimentation, begging, dehumanisation.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 6 : Please…**

“ **Get It Out” | No More | “Stop, Please…”**

–

**IDW Rung**

–

Rung locks up his office and trails out into the cool night-cycle air, dodging around a pair of taller mecha who haven’t seen him in their path and ducking into an alleyway shortcut, making for home. The main thoroughfare is not far from the building his office is in – it’s only a street away from one of the main hospitals – but Rung deserts the brightly-lit parts quickly in favour of descending down a couple of levels and ending up in the darker, less well-maintained, _poorer_ layers.

Despite his salary more than covering the cost of rent in the glittering façade above, Rung has long since found that he much prefers life down here, where, he feels privately, the _real_ mecha are. Their lives are just so much more _genuine_ in a lot of ways, less grand-standing, less social politics. Rung has never had much like for having to play nice with people who would disrespect him based on appearance and disregard his skill, and, you know, _inherent worth as a sentient,_ but being able to smile through even the most ignorant comments has gotten him as secure a position as he can manage in their discriminatory society.

It feels nasty sometimes – a lot of the time, really – but Rung won’t be able to help people if he’s locked away himself, so he mostly stays quiet and works hard in the background. It still feels like not enough, but what can one mech do against such power? Such power _misused?_

Perhaps his habit of renting and travelling through the, shall we say, _ill-reputed_ parts of the city might be considered somewhat dangerous for a mech his size with no defensive weaponry or training, but the optics of the homeless mecha (who are rarely violent, despite what the enforcers would have one believe) Rung walks past – and drops some shanix into their cups, he’s not _sparkless –_ gaze past him, never lingering long enough for him to be sure whether they’ve actually _seen him_ or not.

It seems like nobody ever sees him. Except when he doesn’t want them to.

To Rung, this is just the way things are.

Home is not a far trek to one unafraid to use the short-cuts, and Rung is walking into his apartment building soon enough, climbing up the stairs – there is no lift – ‘til he reaches the third floor and inputs his key code into the dented panel. Despite the battered nature of the building, everything is immaculately clean, because – and, again, despite what the enforcers would have mecha think – the less-fortunate castes do _not_ live in filthy scrap-heaps, not if they can help it.

Rung walks in and – oh. He grimaces, uneasy. “That time again already?” he asks, measured and light, in complete contrast with the clenching fear suddenly strangling his spark. Its light dims, visible through the glass on his chest.

The burly armed mech with the symbol of the Functionist Council emblazoned on his right shoulder pauldron nods. His optics keep trying to trail away from Rung, but he firmly refocuses constantly. His face is unfortunately familiar; he’s one of the few that manages to hold the memory of Rung for longer than a few minutes. Once, Rung had been surprised, a bit joyous. Now, he only wishes that he were even more invisible.

“Call into work; you’re sick,” the mech orders. He looks huge in the room filled with furniture designed for smaller mecha like Rung.

Rung does. The secretary he walks past every day needs to be reminded of his name and the number of his office, but he’s on their systems so it’s not as painful of a conversation as some Rung’s had over the years. “I’m required right away?” he asks the mech in his home after he’s finished with the comm call.

“Get moving,” the mech says shortly, nodding towards the door.

Rung knows better than to argue.

–

As he gets strapped down to the medical berth, Rung wishes - knowing that even as he does so he is lying to himself - that is alt mode were something else – _anything else –_ so that he wouldn’t have been brought to the attention of the Functionist Council. _Useless._ _ **Ornament.**_

The Functionists are trying to figure out what it _does,_ because their very philosophy ascertains that every Cybertronian has a role, a _function,_ and there can’t be an exception, not a single one.

The problem is this: not even Rung knows. He’s always had the same alt mode, for as long as he can remember, and he’s even quietly diagnosed himself with Alt Mode Fidelity – he doesn’t just dislike upgrades to his hardware, he _actively resists them._ Changing himself, changing _anything_ about himself, just – it’s horrific, the concept, and no small part of Rung rebels at the very thought. So what if he’s a _functionless ornament?_ This frame is _his!_

The Functionists, of course, don’t see it that way.

Rung winces as a stasis-lock inducer chip is plugged into the medical port on his neck. The medic – scientist? – didn’t even warn him before doing so. Not that Rung expected him to, to be fair, since you’ve got to have a pretty callous disregard for others to be able to work for the Functionist Council directly, and Rung’s been under this mech’s hands for years on and off. The mech never remembers him between sessions, but he keeps – _meticulous_ notes. Rung’s honestly not sure if he even wants to see them, at this point. They’re going to be nothing but a horror show, typed up and photographed in explicit detail.

Rung watches, detached, defeated, as darkness begins to creep in on the edges of his peripheral vision, the feed pixelating. Then he slips under, and he wishes he could say that pain doesn’t reach him down there, in that dark warm place, but its cold tendrils sink into him anyway, as they ever do.

–

The words are spilling out of Rung’s vocaliser before he’s even come all the way online. “Get it out,” he’s saying, begging, again and again, nothing put a pervasive, invasive feeling of complete and utter _wrongness_ seeping through all of his systems, “get it out, get it out, get it out, get it out…”

“Subject is responding poorly to the new treatment,” reports a voice above him, more curiosity than compassion in its tone. Rung doesn’t recognise it, but – mecha come and go from the Functionist Council’s employment. And if they _go,_ it’s usually by way of the Afterspark.

“Turn down the current to see if any improvement is made,” replies the voice of the medical scientist Rung knows too well.

The other mech fiddles with something, Rung can see his blurry shadow through the pixelation glitching his visual feed, optics coming online too slow, much more slowly than they should. The rest of his sensor suite is similarly lagging, ineffective, and all that does is heighten Rung’s distress. It’s the real life version of the nightmare where something’s chasing you and you just can’t run away fast enough, only applied to his every sense. Nothing’s working right and it’s _terrifying._

There’s _something in his chest._

“What did you do?” Rung demands. “What is that?” He tries to raise his head, to get a better look, but there’s a cuff around his neck holding it down to the berth, and he doesn’t get far.

Rung’s vision clears enough for him to be able to see the medical scientist leaning over him, hands extending down to his frame, hands extending _down inside_ his frame. He pulls at something – Rung yells out a wordless cry of pain – and the light of Rung’s spark spills out to illuminate the doctor’s front, something foreign to his systems rising from his chest, right next to his spark chamber, modded on to it.

“Note that the inducer prototype doesn’t seem to create any effects when its charge is below three-hundred amperes,” the doctor tells what must be his assistant.

“What are you doing to me?” Rung asks, frantic. He is ignored.

“The full effects began at around six-hundred amperes,” the assistant says, scrolling through the notes. “Should we turn it back up?”

“Increase to four-hundred,” the doctor says after a moment. “See if we can get better readings on the partial effects.”

The assistant fiddles with a dial on a machine, and then Rung’s chest is heating up even further, electrical charge sinking into the systems of his alt mode, the ones that surround his spark chamber in root mode. There are insulator caps preventing the charge from spreading to Rung’s other systems, but it still _hurts._ The current from a machine is different from the current produced by a living mech, and for all that crude jokes about electrical engineers are a society favourite, ones certain to get giggles, there is no such thing as a pleasurable overload via charge from anything but another mechanoid. Only painful ones, where damage is done, where a medic is needed and usually right away.

(There’s a reason that being an electrician is a job reserved for the lower castes. For _expendables.)_

Rung’s vocaliser glitches out, trailing a high-pitched whine of pain into first a low-volume scream and then into silence. Rung mouths the words anyway, quick and desperate, knowing they won’t hear, knowing they won’t notice, and knowing they wouldn’t _care_ even if they succeeded in either of the two. _Stop, please…!_

He doesn’t know what they’re doing, what they want. It’s something to do with his alt mode, with how it works. But even Rung doesn’t know how it works, what it does, and the Functionist Council is now attempting to brute force the matter, to get it settled once and for all just _what_ Rung _is._

_(I’m different,_ Rung has long thought, gazing out to the crowd of other Cybertronians, unable to fully shake the feeling that while they are like him, _he_ is not fully like _them._ It’s not something he’s ever been able to fully describe, not even to himself, and if it’s a part of the reason that he’s spent a lifetime pushing the boundaries of psychological and sociological research, in a vain attempt to figure out just _what is wrong with him,_ then it’s not something Rung is ever going to admit out loud.)

“Spark output has increased,” the assistant reports, his voice so very far away. “There’s – look at this, sir.”

The medical scientist leans over to where the assistant is pointing, both of the two looming over Rung, huge shadows above him, peering in, wanting to pull him apart to see how he ticks. “Yes, I see it,” the doctor says. “Spark energy – _coalescing.”_

_Please, stop,_ Rung begs up at them silently. _Please, no more, no more._ There’s a deep impending sense that something is about to go _very wrong,_ and Rung can’t shake it.

“Turn up the charge,” the doctor says, raising a hand to adjust the recorder he’s wearing attached just above his left optic, the little light blinking red. Rung has no doubt that his pain will be saved and backed up on a dozen hard drives. “Six-hundred amperes.”

The strange systems of Rung’s alt mode groan to life under such pressure, moving inside his chest, and his transformation cog screeches as it tries to switch him out of root mode, to do whatever it is that his alt actually does.

The doctor hits a switch and all the cuffs retract back into the berth. Rung doesn’t even get the chance to think of escape, he is already following instinct and collapsing into his alt mode, the systems of it finally aligning in a rush of – he can’t call it relief, but perhaps not-pain.

Rung is quivering in place on the medical berth, his alt mode whirring outside of his control, the awkward _thing_ modded onto his spark chamber sitting painfully inside of him. There’s a flash of light, a sense of _detachment,_ and then Rung’s alt mode – _produces_ something, before winding down.

“Oh, my,” says the doctor, wonderment in his voice, his assistant echoing him with a gasp of his own.

Rung transforms, shaking, flinching, and looks down.

Resting on the medical berth, the beginnings of a spark coalescing inside, a glowing photonic crystal sits impossibly, daring the world to question its existence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, look. The Matrix - which in IDW is the source of sparks for the Constructed Cold mecha - is canonically a whole bunch of photonic crystals melded together. I propose that if Rung produces a photonic crystal and leaves it alone for a while to gather electrical energy, this energy will coalesce into a spark, which will then set about turning the metal around it into _sentio metallico_ and building itself a frame. The whole process just got - fast-forwarded, in this case.
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	7. Enemy To Caretaker | IDW | Megatron + Rodimus Prime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: grievous injury, mistaken identity due to time/dimension travel, background war/war crimes/genocide, the difficulties of redemption, lack of trust, fear of further injury, body modification.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 7 : I’ve Got You**

**Support | Carrying | Enemy To Caretaker**

–

**IDW Megatron + Rodimus Prime**

–

Rodimus is certain he must be dead already.

He remembers – Primus, what does he remember? He remembers the blast from the fusion cannon, he remembers _that_ very clearly. Megatron – rebuilt, more brutal and terrifying than ever. Being blasted straight out the ship and off into space…

So… what happened then?

He – floated away, nothing to slow him down in a vacuum, of course, and… and…

The Matrix, bright and warm around his neck, the only spot of heat and light in the coldness of space. Rodimus has been in space before, of course, out on ship hulls doing repairs or forcefully boarding Decepticon vessels with the Wreckers, but _never_ before had he been so _cold,_ all his lines and cables feeling like they were going brittle, that the lightest touch could shatter them.

He’d caught a glimpse of the outside of the ship as he’d spun away from it, and the Matrix had _flared,_ bright – too bright – and what sticks in the memory files is Megatron’s face, the way it _changed._ A look of vague contempt, like destroying Rodimus had been nothing, like he’d just been swatting away an irritant, and how it had then _contorted_ into something else.

Rodimus can barely begin to describe the expression on Megatron’s face with the brief look he had managed to get before his visual feed had given out. It was like – like waking into a nightmare; like the moment that Hot Rod had realised _what he must do_ way back in Nyon, like the moment the world around him had all its light stripped away, and he’d felt like he was walking in a dream, only it was _so real._

Rodimus isn’t cold anymore, though. His HUD is still full of error messages, and his sensor-net is only giving him agonising pain as its feedback, but – he’s not in space anymore. There’s a warmth, an atmosphere, one that comes from the outside, and not just the pinprick of heat that is set inside his chest, where the Matrix is, holding him together by divine will.

“Awake?” comes a voice, and – _oh slag it all to the fragging Pits!_

Rodimus tries, and fails, to lurch up. It’s – he can’t deny his own fear. That voice is famous – _infamous –_ and why the slag is _Megatron_ here?!

He onlines his optics, visual feed still patchy, but they do, in fact, online, which is better than before. He turns his head, and he would try to move the rest of his frame, but he honestly can’t _feel_ most of it, not through numbness, but through full-frame agony so pervasive he honestly can’t differentiate one limb from another.

And, yeah, it’s him all right. It’s _Megatron._

Rodimus tries, and, again, fails, to shuffle backwards, to try and get away. His vocaliser is making a high-pitched whining noise, laced with static, and actually Rodimus is fine with that, because if it were in any better shape, the sound he’d be making would be a cry or a scream or something of the like.

“Rodimus,” says Megatron, and Rodimus honestly cannot parse out what tone of voice he’s using, and his damaged audios are only partially to blame.

And – how does Megatron know that name? Rodimus only started calling himself _Rodimus_ not that long ago, and, sure, Megatron knew _Hot Rod,_ but he shouldn’t know _Rodimus._

(And, no, no matter what Swindle said while trying to flatter him, Rodimus is _not_ going to go around calling himself _Rodimus Prime._ There’s been more than enough mecha who’ve claimed that title without the Matrix to choose them, and most of _them_ were either conspirators or puppets of the Functionist Council.

Okay, fine, there’s the Matrix around his neck right now, embedded in his chest, and – he thinks it might be linked into his systems. Does the fact that he’s not dead yet, that the Matrix is – he instinctually knows – keeping him alive… Rodimus doesn’t think that _counts_ as being _chosen._

_Optimus_ was chosen; Rodimus was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.)

Still, Rodimus isn’t one to stay silent when he could open his big fat mouth and make things worse. “M-me-ggg-aa-trroo-nn,” he wheezes out, stubborn, trying to subdue the part of him that just wants to be screaming.

And then Megatron’s leaning over him, and Rodimus is flinching back, trying to spontaneously spawn a phase-generator from his imagination so he can sink down into the ground beneath him. That doesn’t happen, of course, and all that is accomplished is Rodimus’ spoiler wings scraping a new height of torment and an indecipherable look crossing Megatron’s face that Rodimus would read as a guilty wince on anyone that wasn’t fragging _Megatron._

“I’m sorry,” Megatron says, pain upon his face, and, uh, _what?_

“Sss-ooo-rrrr-yy?” Rodimus repeats, and he tries to make it accusing, he really does, but tone is kind of beyond his vocaliser at the moment, and he’s sure it would have come out as more confused than angry even it it wasn’t.

“I don’t know what happened, Rodimus,” Megatron says, which – _blatant lie!_ This fragger _shot him!_ “There was a commotion in Brainstorm’s lab, and the next thing I know, I’m watching you drift away, my cannon still smoking.”

“Wwhhat do yoo-uu meeaa-nn?” Rodimus gets out. “Brr-aain-st-st-oorrm?”

Megatron’s face falls. “You don’t remember,” he says, softly. “You’re – this time’s Rodimus.”

Rodimus genuinely has no idea what’s going on here. It must show in whatever ruin is left of his face, because Megatron grimaces.

“There has been – yet another – incident with time travel,” Megatron tells him, so matter-of-fact about something that belongs in a sci-fi holo-film, not in reality. “I am the Megatron of, oh, probably about two centuries from now, give or take eight hundred years.”

“The fraagg?” Rodimus says, because what else do you say?

“The war is over, when I’m from,” Megatron says, like that’s not the most shocking piece of news Rodimus has heard for millennia. “I am part of the crew of an outreach ship called – ah. Spoilers. I work with disaster relief and humanitarian efforts as part of my sentence. As I will do for the next eight million years. I’m not – I’m not about to _hurt_ you, Rodimus.”

“All-rrea-dy did,” Rodimus says, picking out the one thing that he can actually process right now. The rest of it is – Primus, it’s – it’s nice? He supposes? The idea of the war being over, obviously yeah, great. Megatron – redeeming himself, somehow? Being brought to justice, and not the kind of _justice_ that is only more death? That’s – Rodimus won’t deny a part of him that screams that Megatron should die for his crimes – and by that logic Rodimus should die for the same – but. In the choice between Megatron _stopping_ and becoming a better person, and Megatron dying, then…

_The most important step a mech can take is the next._ Rodimus got told that centuries before the war, and – it’s important to him, the idea that people can change.

“Yes,” Megatron says, looking Rodimus over. “I did. I can’t undo that, but – I can help you now. I – I have medical training. I don’t know if you ever read my works, but – I wanted to be a medic before the war. Typical that only _after_ all this pain, I would get the opportunity.”

“Wwho?” Rodimus asks before he can stop himself.

Megatron smiles down at him, and it isn’t his sadistic, terrifying smile. “Ratchet,” he answers, his tone light like he’s sharing a joke. “Yes, I know.”

Rodimus doesn’t have an answer to the idea that _Ratchet,_ the _Autobot CMO,_ and, admittedly an old friend of both Optimus and Megatron, will teach Megatron how to repair instead of rend at some point in the near future. Assuming Megatron is telling the truth.

(Rodimus decides, consciously, to set aside thoughts of _is-he-isn’t-he_ regarding the truth of the tale Megatron is telling. He’ll just drive himself _crazy_ thinking in circles, and, right now, he’s actually got more immediate concerns than whether time travel is now going to have to become part of his world-view.)

Rodimus tries to talk again, but all that comes out is another noise of pain. He’s not crying – he’s _not –_ but only because the small reservoirs of optical fluid just beneath his optical sockets have been ruptured and already leaked their contents, leaving him nothing to cry with.

Then Megatron’s hands are on him, and – Primus, it _hurts._ Rodimus makes a garbled cry, and then his vocaliser sputters out completely.

“Don’t struggle,” Megatron says urgently, like that’s going to make Rodimus not try to struggle with all his might. “Rodimus! Stay _still._ I’m trying to see to your wounds.”

The medical port on Rodimus’ forearm is opened, and _no no no,_ he doesn’t want _Megatron_ inside his systems! Only he’s not exactly got much of a choice on that; Megatron’s cable clicks in and then all of Rodimus’ firewalls are taken down with a fragging _verified medical override._

Then the Matrix – oh Primus, what is it _doing? –_ the Matrix is – inside Rodimus’ systems, _changing them,_ and there’s a bright light and Megatron is hurriedly disconnecting as Rodimus’ frame begins to _shift,_ to _transform –_

–

There’s someone carrying him.

Rodimus blinks online, a full-frame ache that’s far closer to pain than he would like pulsing through his perception, and the sight of a rocky ground below him swaying slightly as he gazes down at it from his position slumped over another mech’s shoulder, their hands supporting him in place, politely avoiding his spoiler wings.

“Nnghh?” is the only sound he manages to make.

“Rodimus?” comes a voice, and that’s the moment when all of Rodimus’ memory files come surging back in.

_Megatron!_

Rodimus tries to pull away, get out of this hold, and – he succeeds, actually, sliding down, only he keeps sliding all the way to the hard ground, ambulatory systems failing him. He sprawls in the dirt in an inelegant slump.

Now, there’s a lot of things Rodimus could say, starting with _Megatron!_ and stopping by _time travel,_ perhaps ending with _what the fragging hell._ What he ends up saying, into the dusty surface of whatever planet they’re on, is: “Where are we?”

“Some Primus-forsaken planet designated LV-118,” Megatron answers, kneeling down on one knee next to Rodimus. “According to your future self, this is where you ended up – originally. I have heard the tale, and there is a couple of things we need to do here before we rejoin the wider universe.”

“Wouldn’t changing things now cause a temporal paradox?” Rodimus asks, pulling on all his knowledge of sci-fi tropes, registering belatedly that his vocaliser is fixed. He awkwardly props himself up, manoeuvring to sit on the ground rather than lie in a heap.

“Split timeline,” Megatron says. “I received a message while you were in stasis-lock, from my own timeline. They’re currently down myself and up one very angry and confused Decepticon leader. I told them to take the time to straighten him out before swapping us back. We’ve agreed to remain in contact with each other.”

“Great,” Rodimus sighs, saying the first thing that springs to mind. “ _Two_ Megatrons to worry about.”

Then he freezes, but – Megatron _laughs._ “Neither will be a match for the great Rodimus Prime,” he says. His red optics meet Rodimus’ with no hesitation, no jeering, just a strange fondness.

“Just Rodimus,” Rodimus says. “I’m not a Prime.”

“Oh? I would perhaps take a second look at yourself, Rodimus,” Megatron replies, looking Rodimus up and down. “The Matrix has been – obliging.”

Rodimus does, and – this is not how he last saw his frame. For one, he seems to have grown about a third again of his height. For two, there’s a warm humming in his chest, right over his spark chamber, and Rodimus _knows what that is._ “The frag?”

“Oh, I think you are _Rodimus Prime_ in every sense now.” Megatron doesn’t even have the decency to say it mockingly.

Rodimus places his head into his hands. “Primus,” he says, at a loss for words. _“Primus.”_

“Rung,” Megatron says, as though that makes any sense at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The two Megatrons have been consciousness-swapped, rather than body-swapped, which is definitely a deliberate choice on the author's part and in no way something I have to clarify in the end note because I forgot that the two look completely different from each other immediately after the first few paragraphs. Totally intentional, I swear.
> 
> Do I constantly make references back to my own My Canon Now IDW ending? Yes. Am I going to stop? No. 
> 
> (The fic that presents the set-up for the future that Megatron came from is [Atonement](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25249054)).
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!
> 
> **There is now a short bullet-point fic continuation of this instalment in the comments below! Scroll down a little :)**


	8. Isolation | G1 | Hot Rod

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: abandonment by a deity, isolation, deities with physical forms, background war, implied extinction of a sentient species, some light violence, fate vs free will, consequences, hopeful ending.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 8 : Where Did Everybody Go?**

~~“ **Don’t Say Goodbye”**~~ **| Abandoned | Isolation**

–

**G1 Hot Rod | Rodimus Prime**

–

Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime is brought online for the very first time in a rush of frightening action. His systems are booting up, running checks, and he’s just barely gotten a grip on the amazement of now _being_ whereas before he was _not,_ when there are sudden hands gripping him tightly and dragging him down and to the side, in a move that Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime will later learn as the typical _someone’s shooting at us, get behind cover right now_ manoeuvre, but right now is merely confusing.

There’s someone tucking him under their arm, pulling him in, and _wow,_ this is another mech, this is another person who’s _just like Hot-Rod-_ _Rodimus-Prime_ _!_ Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime has _so_ many questions, but it all seems to be not quite the right time, because there are flashes of light zipping above and around them.

Just looking at them induces combat programs in Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime’s core coding to identify them as photon charges, and for the same program to tell him that getting hit with one of those is _not good_ , and that he would be in danger of death, which is the end of being, which is definitely something Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime wants to avoid because he would very much like to continue being Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime, thank you very much.

“You okay, mech?” asks the other. He’s green, larger than Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime, with what combat programs identify as a standard-issue blaster in his right hand, his left one still curled around Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime, holding him close.

“Yeah,” Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime says. He notices that there’s a red symbol painted onto the mech’s front, and that it’s the same as his own symbol. There’s a strange feeling in the back of his mind as he notices that – something about wearing the symbol being _wrong_ for him, somehow, the feeling certain but currently wordless – but he ignores it for the moment. “Um. Why are they shooting at us?”

The mech chuckles. “They’re Decepticons, we’re Autobots. We kinda hate each other. Look, I’m real sorry about this, ‘cause you didn’t deserve this kinda awakening, but are your combat programs running all clear? I could use a bit of back-up on our escape.”

“They are,” Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime confirms.

“I’ll lend you my spare blaster, then, and – what are you – ?” the mech cuts himself off as Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime activates his triple barrel forearm laser blasters, his multi-range scanning visor descending from the lip his helm makes above his optics, Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime activating the aiming sub-program. “Huh. Integrated weaponry.”

“What?” Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime asks, picking up immediately on the strange tone of voice. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” the green Autobot says, “it’s just that weapons systems integrated right from sparking tend to appear more in, uh, ‘Cons than ‘Bots. Wasn’t in your specs, anyway. Musta been an adjustment Vector Sigma made.” He carefully raises his head above their cover, takes a few shots, and ducks back down.

“They are,” Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime confirms. “Vector Sigma didn’t want me defenceless.” He looks down at his guns, but. He hesitates to fire them. If he conforms now, there’s a sense that he won’t be able to go back. Won’t be able to do things _properly._

“… Huh,” the green mech says again. “Vector Sigma, uh, tell you that?”

“Yes,” Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime says, oblivious ‘til he looks back on the memory later how startlingly unknown such a thing is, “before they sent me here.” And now he knows why.

“… Didn’t know it could do that,” the Autobot says.

“They,” Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime corrects. “Vector Sigma is not an _it.”_

“It’s a _computer,”_ the mech says, and Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime tries not to get mad at him for his ignorance, but _how can he say that?_ Vector Sigma is self-evidently _sentient._ They _care._ And because they care, they made Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime the way he is, not the way these – Autobots – wanted him made.

“ **I am Vector Sigma,”** comes the voice from behind. **“Before Cybertron was, I was.”**

The green mech jerks in place, and there’s a stunned silence from across the room, just outside in the corridor, where blaster bolts have stopped being fired. The blast door cycles shut, locking the green mech and Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime inside the central Sigma chamber. Off to the side, another door cycles open.

“ **And now we are gone,”** Vector Sigma intones. **“So _be_ gone, Autobot Springer. No more new-sparks will come forth to die from this day. So I have decreed, so it must be.”**

“Oh, Primus,” the green mech – Springer? – gasps. Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime stands from his side, crossing the room to where Vector Sigma’s golden central matrix is floating. “You – damn it, I don’t know your name – get back here!”

“I’m not an Autobot,” Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime replies, the words irrefutable truth he came online with, that previously wordless foundation in his core, “no matter what you intended me to be. Vector Sigma has chosen a different future.”

“Then you’re a _‘Con?!”_

“No,” Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime says, calm, confident, almost serene. “I am a _Key.”_

“ **The only Key, now,”** Vector Sigma confirms. **“And we are gone from you.”**

The golden light spilling from the central matrix gets brighter, enveloping the room. It’s warm and good but also sad and angry. For Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime, it has only love to give.

The light dissipates, and Springer is left alone in an empty room, the heart of Cybertron, the source of his species’ life, just – gone.

It is said that Vector Sigma is the relay to Primus, their god who sleeps in the depths of their planet, and whatever religious beliefs a mech might hold, whether they believe Primus is real or not, it is unmistakable fact that Vector Sigma is empirically existent.

And it has now abandoned them.

–

It’s lonelier being The Key than Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime thought it would be.

Technically speaking, they haven’t left Cybertron. Vector Sigma and its Key have moved farther in, gone deeper. Closer, Vector Sigma says, to where Primus’ spark chamber is.

These are tunnels no mortal mech was ever meant to walk. Ancient glyphs are inscribed in flowing arches, and there’s the unmistakable feeling of there being a – _pulse_ – behind the metal. Of there being the slow rumble of systems shifting, the pumping of energon through lines, and, hey, Primus is _the entire planet,_ isn’t he? And down here, within his depths, it’s all the more obvious.

There’s something to be said – there’s a _lot_ of things to be said, actually – regarding the damage the war has inflicted upon the slumbering god. And, Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime feels, uneasily, perhaps he’s less _slumbering_ than _in stasis-lock due to injury._ It’s not a happy thought, that their god might be _dying_ at the hands of his children, but – there’s not much Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime can do that hasn’t already been done. He’s the Key, and Vector Sigma has taken and hidden them both, far out of reach, and –

Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime thinks that the plan might be to simply let the Autobots and Decepticons kill each other off, let them fight their way into extinction, and then the God, the Conduit, and the Key will start over, wipe the slate and begin anew.

It’s not a plan that sits well upon Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime. Not because he thinks that such an abandonment is undeserved, since there’s _over_ _two hundred million dead,_ and surely the line has to be drawn somewhere, but – giving up on people is not in his spark.

So, anyway, it’s… lonely. Vector Sigma floats before the door leading into the inner chamber, where Primus’ laser core is set, and they don’t exactly talk a lot, much less spend time with Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime. So he wanders about, and there’s mecha-miles upon mecha-miles of corridors and tunnels and rooms, all set in the spaces inside of a mech, all very similar to Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime’s own inner construction, only sized up to befit someone whose alt mode is a _planet._

But despite the size of the area Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime has to roam about in, it is, in the end, finite. He reaches and then maps, over long years, the boundaries of the space, where corridors end abruptly, where there’s an obvious change in the pathing, which doors won’t open because beyond them is the way up, the surface, and with it only death and destruction.

It’s silent, here, bar the muted sounds of Primus’ internals, his sign of life. Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime wonders if the upper systems have been cut off somehow, so that their rust and errors won’t spread deeper in, so that above is only pieces of a corpse still attached to the living parts, with a sharp quarantine between the two. He never asks, because he’s not sure if he wants to know the answer.

Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime sings, sometimes, to fill the stagnant air. The only songs he knows are hymns and chants, songs of praise, all in Primal Vernacular, a language outdating even Old Cybertronian. Vector Sigma had onlined him with such knowledge, but – there’s nothing here that speaks of how the Cybertronians had _lived,_ only how they once worshipped, how they viewed their god. Looking up at the divine, and not across to the faces of their fellow people.

_Maybe that was why they ended up killing so many,_ Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime thinks morbidly one day, though _days_ are not exactly a thing this far down, _they forgot to see their siblings in every face._

But the truth of the matter is, Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime doesn’t _know_ why, and he’s never going to, because there’ll be no one left to ask by the time he makes it up to the surface he’s never seen. He wonders how long it will take. Centuries? Millennia? They’ve warred for such a time that surely only the best warriors survive by now? That might drag it all out a bit.

He decides to ask one day, making the trek all the way back to the core.

“Vector Sigma,” he says, “why did the war begin?”

Vector Sigma hums to themselves, resonant and musical, spinning slowly in place. Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime waits patiently – he has been forced to learn patience, for the time scales of divine beings do not match those understood by mortals, and even if Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime is not strictly mortal, he is created from such a frame, and its physical limitations linger.

One day passes, two, three. Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime remains still, standing and waiting, like a statue carved from crystal and set into an alcove in an old temple, in a way no true Cybertronian ever could. Nine days later, Vector Sigma answers. **“Hate, and fear. Those who had power sought to keep it, rather than recognise that they and it, like all beings, are subject to the passage of time. They began to see enemies everywhere, and so made them.”**

So Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime wasn’t too far wrong then. “How long will we stay down here?” he asks.

Vector Sigma is faster to answer this time, thankfully. **“Until the wounds upon the planet have healed. Until the old life is long gone, its detritus blown away like crystal petals on the sonic winds. Until there is room for new life to spark, free of the shadow that came before.”**

Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime bows his head. “Until they are all dead, then.”

“ **Yes.”**

Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime bites his lip, denta pressing down, and he thinks about staying quiet, but he _has to know._ “Are they so beyond hope?”

Vector Sigma goes quiet, and their spinning stills. There’s a moment when everything goes so still it’s like time has momentarily frozen. Then it’s broken as Vector Sigma says, **“Should they decide to stop, to come home from their wayward path, then tears of joy and relief may fall in the inner sanctum. They were given choice when Primus created them, and this is what they chose to do. Actions have consequences, and** _ **this**_ **is their consequence. For them to turn back to the light would be beautiful, but it is** _ **their choice,**_ **no matter what we may wish for them.** **Hope is all we have for them.”**

Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime tilts his head. “Primus and yourself cannot speak to them, cannot influence their choice,” he says, slowly, and at Vector Sigma’s agreeing hum he continues. “But I was made of a frame they put together. Am _I_ constrained by the same rules?”

Hot-Rod-Rodimus-Prime never thought that he would witness Vector Sigma shocked into silence.

A rumbling laugh, tinged with sudden hope, echoes all around, vibrating through the halls and rooms of Primus, originating from the deepest core.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It honestly got to the point where I just started copy-pasting Roddy's name in this one. He's got both of them _because_ he's both simultaneously (sort-of demigods don't play by normal rules). 
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	9. Ritual Sacrifice | IDW | Rodimus Prime + Drift

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: cults and cult activity, captivity, ritual sacrifice, Lovecraftian horror, huge mood whiplash about half-way through, ambiguous ending, IDW post-canon which is its own warning honestly, past ambiguous relationships/unrequited love (Rodimus isn't the biggest Dratchet fan, but he's _trying_ to be supportive), implied past sexual content.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 9 : For The Greater Good**

“ **Take Me Instead” | “Run!” | Ritual Sacrifice**

–

**IDW Rodimus Prime + Drift**

–

Rodimus wakes up, systems quietly cycling up, optics off, sensor suite stretching out to give him the best approximation of the situation that it can. The last thing he remembers is getting forcibly knocked offline by some kind of EMP that razed throughout the whole shuttle, leaving them dead in space before his and Drift’s own systems had failed on them, dropping them into stasis-lock.

…There’s chains around him. _Great._ Another marvellous misadventure, and he’s not even got the _Lost Light_ and its crew to back him up this time.

He can feel Drift’s EM field not far from him, and from the way it’s gently pulsing, Drift is awake, too. Rodimus weighs up the risks – there’s no one else about that his scanners can sense, but half of his systems are still lagging and glitchy, so… – before choosing to light up his optics and turn his head to face Drift.

“Finally up,” Drift remarks, lying chained to an altar next to him. Rodimus is looking down; he’s secured to a metal column, standing upright, if somewhat slumped.

“Please tell me we aren’t in one of Swerve’s holo-films,” Rodimus says, optics taking in the careful painted lines spiralling in circles on the large altar around Drift’s spread-eagle frame.

“I wish I could,” Drift replies. “I hope you know that Ratty’s going to bring you back to life just so he can kill you again if you get me slagged just after we’ve finished our honeymoon.”

“Don’t his patients already will themselves back to life out of fear sometimes?” Rodimus asks, knowing that Drift is just trying to lighten the situation, but feeling the words hit somewhere deep anyway.

He shouldn’t – he absolutely _shouldn’t –_ view Drift finally conjunxing the love of his life as _losing him,_ but – he can’t help it. It’s bad and it’s nasty and it’s selfish, but Rodimus can’t help his occasionally petty nature. Just as long as he keeps his mouth shut, he should be all right. He can keep pretending everything’s fine, everything’s just as it was before Rodimus let Drift take the blame for his crime, and Ratchet went to go find him when Rodimus didn’t. He _deserves this._

“Ratty only wishes,” Drift sighs.

The sound of murmuring voices getting closer has Drift and Rodimus tense a little, Rodimus turning to face the direction of the noise while Drift is stuck watching Rodimus for cues, unable to crane his neck at the right angle.

The altar and the column are set in a very large clearing, organic foliage surrounding it in thick bushes of warm yellows, tiny pale green flowers blooming here and there. A small procession of cloaked organics about two-thirds the height of the average Cybertronian step into view, following the curving path leading through the foliage, approaching the two bound mechs.

The leader – it has to be the leader, Rodimus thinks, since he’s the one with the _stupid hat –_ speaks in an accented common trading language used throughout the known galaxies, Conmerix, “Mecha, do you accept to kneel before the One-Of-Unnumbered-Eyes?”

“The only person I kneel before is Drift,” Rodimus says, “and only when I’m sucking him off.” Not that that’s happened any time in the recent years, but it’s whatever, really. It’s _absolutely fine._

Drift muffles a snort as the organic male stiffens, and then repeats, harsher, “Do you accept to kneel before the One-Of-Unnumbered-Eyes?”

“Have they got pretty eyes?” Rodimus asks. “I’m a sucker for pretty eyes.”

Lying on the altar, Drift is biting his lip to keep from laughing, and surely only millennia of living with them ensures that his sharp canine denta don’t pierce the soft metal of his lips. Rodimus has always had a weakness for them, and kissing Drift was always wonderful, but now is probably not the time for such thoughts, so he focuses back on the organics as best he can. He may want to laugh in their faces, but he’s also chained up with stasis cuffs, so it’s best to try and get he and Drift out of this as smoothly as possible.

“Then you refuse to kneel?” asks the leader of the – cult, probably.

“I do,” Rodimus says. “And I’m kinda curious, to be honest; why are we here and what do you plan to do with us?”

“The One-Of-Unnumbered-Eyes yearns for sacrifices,” the leader answers, “and your species’ souls are bright and powerful. Our lord hungers for them.”

“I’m not really down with becoming some divine spark-eater’s lunch, to be quite honest,” Drift speaks up. “Can we take a rain-check?”

Rodimus sniggers. The leader only becomes more incensed, the other cloaked organics surrounding him shifting in place. “Such disrespect is only expected of heathens,” he says stiffly, “but you will see soon enough.”

The leader gestures to his minions, and they fan out, surrounding the altar and standing at set intervals, each with one of the large symbols directly before their feet. The leader himself steps up to the head of the altar, directly above the top of Drift’s helm. He leans over, hooded eyes staring into Drift’s blue optics, and says, “You will be the first to feel the power of the One-Of-Unnumbered-Eyes. And then your – companion.”

“Don’t suppose you’d accept credits in return for letting us go?” Drift asks. Rodimus kind of wants to tell Drift not to offer up his bank account in return for their freedom, ‘cause surely Drift needs it to settle down and spoil Ratchet and himself, right? Of course, he also needs his life to do that, too, so Rodimus stays quiet.

“Money is a matter that concerns only the unchosen,” the leader replies. “Anything we need, the One-Of-Unnumbered-Eyes provides.”

“Does the One-Of-Unnumbered-Eyes pay your taxes?” Rodimus asks.

The leader growls, the sound rippling through the air, and from their sleeve a furred hand tipped with blunted claws emerges. “You laugh now, but soon you will never laugh again,” he says, reaching down to trace the red lines painted on Drift’s face with his fingers, the claws clacking lightly against the metal. “Begin,” he orders his followers.

The group raise their hands in the air and begin to chant, rhythmic and slow, clearly a practised set of words. Rodimus honestly doesn’t expect anything to actually happen – who would, when it feels like he’s in a B-grade human horror film slapped together in less than a year for the Halloween rush? – but the air grows heavy with static electricity and it feels like gravity has briefly increased. Oh, and the painted sigils around the altar begin to glow. There’s that, too.

Drift darts an alarmed look at Rodimus, and Rodimus meets it with one of his own. The confidence he felt before is swiftly vanishing, blown away like smoke on a breeze as the heaviness of the atmosphere continues to increase, the chanting getting louder somehow, more echoing, the wind stilling and the foliage frozen.

Something inside Rodimus contracts, some primal base coding instinct slamming into him like a combiner, urging him incessantly to _get out,_ to _hide,_ to make himself as small as possible and _hope that it doesn’t notice him._ From the sudden gasp and flare of Drift’s EM field, he’s had the same thing just happen to him.

The symbols glow bright for one moment, filling the entire area with their light, before abruptly going dark and still. With them, they take all the light: if it was day before, now there is nothing but an endless sea of blackness above, not even the light of stars piercing through. The foliage surrounding them becomes nothing more than dark shapes in the still gloom, Rodimus and Drift’s optics the only lights. The air is still, not even the humming of internals or the rustle of clothing making it to Rodimus’ audios.

From the darkness, something even darker begins to emerge.

The sound of it cuts through the world like a stone dropped into a stagnant pool. In the sky, the air ripples, contorts, tears open, and from within there is a susurrus of sliding sounds, like scales on scales, and Rodimus once spent time on Earth, and once saw a snake bathing itself on a rock in the sun in a desert where he was sitting in alt form and lying low, and the sound of it curling its own body to arrange itself into a coil is not unlike what he’s hearing now.

Only, there was but one snake then, and this sounds like thousands of them, their sinuous bodies rasping against each other, up there in that hole in reality.

Rodimus is certain, so very, very certain, suddenly, that he _doesn’t want to see what that is._

Instinctually, he struggles against his bindings, the chains clanking but holding firm, the stasis-cuffs zapping him for his impunity. In his peripheral vision, he can see Drift’s bright blue optics snap to him, twin sconces through the heavy darkness. All of a sudden, the rest of the sound rushes back in, and Rodimus can hear clothing and foliage and internals again, and ever-present over it all, the rasping sound of snakes.

The organic cult are silent. In the gloom, he can see their forms, slumped to the ground, and they’re alive on his scanners, some unconscious, some barely awake, but they’re suddenly the least of Rodimus’ concerns. He wants to call out to Drift, to get reassurance that he’s all right, but some base instinct holds his glossa and mutes his vocaliser, rendering him speechless. _Don’t attract its attention!_

_Yeah, well, frag that,_ Rodimus thinks, before he reaches for his last resort: he ignites the super-heated energon that flows through his lines naturally, the thing that had him dodging enforcers right from a new-spark, when the medics confirmed him as being an Outlier, and they tried to cull him, and Hot Rod had fled into the labyrinthine depths of Nyon and fallen in with the resistance.

The flames erupt from his body in an unmistakable _whoosh!_ and suddenly the whole scene is illuminated: the cloaked forms on the ground, Drift on the altar, and the writhing mass of scaled tentacles in the sky, slowly emerging from the dimensional tear. The chains and cuffs melt around him, and that hurts, but Rodimus is lurching forward, uncaring if he’s burning the organics – there are some hoarse screams, but _slag them,_ he’s not dying because he got busy trying to save Drift’s would-be murderers – and begins to pull at Drift’s chains, their metal warping in his hands.

Up in the sky, embedded without any respect for standard anatomical placements, a multitude of eyes open up within the curling mass. Rodimus could not tell you what their colours were; the One-Of-Unnumbered-Eyes seemed to be black and grey and white and blue and red and a thousand other colours all at the same time, its body ever-changing, ever-shifting, never the same between one moment and the next. Looking at it _hurt._

Drift is up off the altar is what must be only seconds but felt like a lifetime underneath the gaze of the _thing_ up above. Rodimus dares not extinguish his flames; it allows _it_ to see them, but something primal insists that the darkness is _its_ domain, and letting it back in, letting shadows touch his frame, would be the same as kneeling before it with his spark-chamber open and saying _I belong to you now._

“Drift,” Rodimus gets out, knowing, suddenly and horribly, what he has to do. _“Run!”_

Drift’s optics are wide, but they narrow then. “Not without you,” he says, seeing immediately what Rodimus’ plan is.

Rodimus has so many things he wants to say, but no time in which to say them. Instead, he gets out, trying to make it as persuasive as possible, no matter how much it all hurts, “Go, Drift. You’ve got Ratchet back home, remember? Go back to him, to back to your Conjunx, go back home, go and forget about me. I’ll keep ugly up there occupied.”

_I love you,_ he keeps pinned under his glossa.

Drift looks incredibly resistant, so Rodimus shoves him, and it’s completely unfair that the last thing Rodimus will ever do to Drift is hurt him, is _burn him,_ scorching his plating with his own awful touch, but life isn’t fair, and Rodimus accepted that millennia ago. “Go!” he shouts. “We can’t fight it, so just go! Please, there’s no way we’re both getting out of here,” Rodimus knows this for _fact,_ “so go back home to Ratchet, _please!”_

Reluctant, Drift goes, glancing behind on his way. Rodimus watches him ‘til he’s gone from sight, before turning to the _thing_ up above, whose many eyes are watching _all of them._

“Leave him,” Rodimus begs. “Leave him be. Take me instead. Look, I’ve got a spark supercharged by the Matrix – surely I’m worth both of us?”

Rodimus suddenly becomes the focus of those many eyes as he slides his chest armour open, baring his white-blue spark to its gaze, fighting against all the base instincts in him crying out. He can’t fight this thing, no firepower made by mortals is enough to even irritate it, but he can die for Drift, and if that is to be his fate, then it is enough.

One of those many writhing tentacles reaches for him, and Rodimus shutters his optics as tight as they will go.

Still, even behind them, he can see blueish-white light blazing through the clearing, the sound of clicking and hissing both above and below his audio range echoing out.

_Let Drift get away,_ he prays to a god he doesn’t even believe in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Drift + Rodimus relationship is so important to me. 
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!
> 
> **There is now a short bullet-point fic continuation of Day 7 (Enemy To Caretaker) back in the comments section of that chapter, in case you're reading this day by day as this fic comes out and have therefore missed it. Go check it out if you're interested!**


	10. Trail Of Blood | IDW | Ultra Magnus + Drift

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: pirates (and their deaths), mostly off-screen violence, excessive amounts of blood, grievous injuries, shooting a corpse to make sure the bastard's dead, referenced potential last stand, background post-war messy aftermath, patching up someone's insides, and a _Pirates of the Caribbean_ reference.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 10 : They Look So Pretty When They Bleed**

**Blood Loss | ~~Internal Bleeding~~ | Trail of Blood**

–

**IDW Ultra Magnus + Drift**

–

The Ultra Magnus Armour’s olfactory sensor is not anywhere near as sensitive as the one that belongs to Minimus Ambus, but it still picks up the heavy stench of spilt energon and other interior mech fluids as he rounds the corner warily, blaster out and ready.

The corridor is mostly empty, save a few glowing spots of energon right near the end of this stretch, spotted on the metal panelling in a way that suggests the mech who spilt it is around average height, from the pattern of the splatter and how far the energon would have had to fall to reach the floor.

Ultra Magnus approaches the spots slowly, ready for anything. The _Lost Light_ gets itself into more _situations_ than any other vessel either Ultra Magnus or Minimus Ambus has ever served on, and the recent boarding of their ship by telekinetic pirates is no exception.

The crew had found themselves fighting numerous pirates and even more numerous floating weaponry before the bell for first shift had even been rung, and Ultra Magnus can feel the leftover exhaustion of yesterday’s back shift weighing on him. It’s being kept at bay by combat programs and millions of years of experience, but, still, a scant two hours of recharge does not a warrior at his peak make.

The spots get bigger the farther along the corridor Ultra Magnus follows them, the bleeding of the mech getting worse. Whatever unfortunate crew member this is – and it will be one of the crew, the pirates are organics, and don’t bleed energon – put up a hell of a fight: there are scorched marks on the walls from a blaster and deep grooves like someone’s been swinging around a bladed weapon. Since the pirates have been utilising both firearms and blades, Ultra Magnus cannot use the evidence to try and determine which mech out of the varied crew it might be.

Ultra Magnus reaches the end of the corridor, and now has the choice to go left or right. On the left side, a dead pirate is spilling their own species’ green-blue blood on the floor, their body slumped in a growing pool, deep cuts upon them. There is a variety of scattered armaments on the ground; a couple of blasters, a vibro-knife, a plasma-net to catch and immobilise people. They all lie still, though Ultra Magnus keeps a wary optic on them; he thinks that inanimate objects might be getting a few second glances from the crew in the coming weeks.

On the right side, the trail of energon continues, this time spilling in greater quantities, no longer just spots but smears as well. On one of the walls, a partial handprint, like a mech was trying to hold themselves up, glows pink on the metal expanse, the bleeding from the mech’s hand heavy enough to transfer enough energon that there are drips sliding down the wall from the handprint.

Ultra Magnus, being rather pragmatic, all things considered, takes a moment to shoot the dead pirate in the head, to make sure he’s really dead and not going to get up the moment Ultra Magnus turns his back, and then picks the right side to walk down, following the trail of his fellow Autobot.

For three more halls, Ultra Magnus follows the ever-growing trail of energon. In the very last hall before the trail ends abruptly at a closed door, the smear on the floor cut off and clearly continuing the other side, there is a full line of handprints along one wall, like the mech was using it to both hold himself up and push himself along.

That’s – a lot of energon loss, especially for a mech whose handprints place him at average size. The trail is attempting to make its way closer to the auxiliary med-bay – a ship as large as the _Lost Light_ always has at least one main med-bay alongside an auxiliary – but it’s still several halls away, and Ultra Magnus doesn’t think the mech made it there, simply by the amount of energon he’s been seeing in the halls.

Ultra Magnus sends the override code he has by virtue of being the second-in-command to unlock the door; that way, no time is wasted if the mech inside decided to use their own access to make it harder for potential pirates to get to them while they were vulnerable. Rodimus, the only one whose captain codes out-rank Ultra Magnus’, is clearing the last of the pirates out of the engine rooms right now, according to the general battle channel, and Ratchet – whose medical codes open _everything –_ is in the main med-bay cursing to himself on the officer’s channel as he labours over whoever is on the medical berth in front of him.

Ultra Magnus tunes him out with the ease of practice. It’s bad comm etiquette, but Rodimus has already made it clear that he captains this ship with a relaxed one-hand-on-the-wheel approach, and Ultra Magnus hasn’t managed to get _him_ to change his ways, and doesn’t fancy trying to get the Autobot CMO, and Optimus Prime’s personal long-lasting friend, to do so either. Ratchet’s optics had dared him to try the first time he arrived late to an officer meeting, a cloth in his hands still wiping clean the splattered mech fluids on his arms, clearly fresh from surgery, and Ultra Magnus – hadn’t. At the time, he’d felt it almost a failure, but as the _Lost Light’s_ quest had gone on, he feels it more a sound tactical choice.

The door cycles open, and there’s the sound of laboured ventilations from inside the storage room. One of the _Lost Light’s_ small armouries, so whoever’s in here must have seen the way things were headed and holed up in here to make a last stand if need demanded it. Ultra Magnus feels some curl of respect for such a steadfast warrior, but he calls in, staying out of the open gap of the door, in case the mech shoots first and asks questions later, “It’s a key.”

The wet-sounding ventilations hitch, and a static-laced vocaliser replies, “No, much more better.” The mech coughs, delaying the completion of the phrase Rodimus had set the instant that the situation was revealed to be pirates, some Earth film quote. “It is a drawing of a key.”

With the confirmation of each other as friendly, Ultra Magnus steps into the room. The lights inside are off, likely to help the mech conceal himself amongst the rows and shelves, enough to get a potential surprise first hit in, no matter how short the window of opportunity, but it doesn’t need to be dark now. Ultra Magnus sends the wireless command code to turn the lights up to full brightness, pinging the control panel by the door, and is grateful for the Armour’s top-tier optical mods that make adjustment instantaneous. For Minimus Ambus’ own optics, deep inside and not on, because he’s currently hard-lined directly into the Ultra Magnus Armour, going from light into dark is non-issue, but dark into light is worse than standard. Turbo-foxes are nocturnal, after all.

Most of the grenades and such have been pilfered from the immediate shelves. There’s no way that the mech would be able to use all of them, but sometimes battle tactics aren’t about obtaining resources, they’re about depriving the enemy of them. Ultra Magnus approves as he walks farther in, following the continuation of the energon trail, even as pink spots glisten on the empty shelves around him.

He rounds the corner of another shelf, and finds Drift mostly-upright, leaning heavily on a pile of storage crates, one arm wrapped around his middle, the other held in front of him, sword out, aimed low at the ground with a trembling grip. His face is drawn in pain and the type of hyper-focus that comes from millions of years of battlefields, and using pain to fuel determination, using what should make a mech keel over instead get up and continue the fight, banked pain making a warrior harder and sharper, the way Ultra Magnus, before the war, thought was only an exaggeration of holo-novels, and not a real thing. True, it is rare and difficult, but – not impossible. Ultra Magnus can even do it himself, nowadays, though thankfully he hasn’t had reason to in the last couple of years.

“Magnus,” Drift rasps out, “the pirates?”

“Captain Rodimus is cornering the last of them in the engine room now,” Ultra Magnus says, stepping closer, optics roving up and down the third-in-command’s frame, trying ascertain how far away from a forced stasis-lock Drift is. “The battle is over.” That’s perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but it is certainly over for Drift.

“Casualties?” Drift asks, letting Ultra Magnus step close, take his weight, lower him to the ground.

“Several in the med-bay or en-route,” Ultra Magnus tells him. “No fatalities so far, nor hard numbers. The medics are too busy as yet, though I suspect we’ll know in the next few hours.”

“Ratchet will report when every patient is seen to and not a moment before,” Drift says, moving his hand so that Ultra Magnus can get a better look at his wound, a temporary medical patch already retrieved from subspace and ready in his hand.

“I suspect that your prediction is accurate,” Ultra Magnus agrees, “considering what I know of him.”

The wound is nasty; the perforation cracking open Drift’s abdominal armour plates is wide and beyond it the fuel lines are ruptured, internal mechanisms juttering in aborted cycles, trying to work but not quite managing it. Watching them is slightly sickening – gore is gore, no matter how much of it Ultra Magnus has borne witness to over the millennia, and there’s something disturbing still about seeing the moving internals of another mech – and Ultra Magnus frowns; such a wound is beyond his emergency first aid abilities.

“You need to go into stasis-lock,” Ultra Magnus says, though he knows that Drift has likely long reached the same conclusion. “Your frame needs to slow down, stop pumping fuel at an active rate. How much have you lost?”

“All o’ the primary tank, most o’ the secon’ry,” Drift answers, vocaliser slurring with static, now. “Auxiliary’s small, though. Only four astro-litres.”

“Stasis-lock, now,” Ultra Magnus orders, infusing his voice with his best _I’m the second-in-command and you_ _ **will**_ _obey me,_ rather than give the fact that Drift is swiftly running out of time any chance to influence his tone.

In a move Ultra Magnus is pleasantly surprised at – considering that Drift is a personal friend of Rodimus, and is somewhat of an enabler for the reckless captain – Drift nods and cycles down his systems, optics going dark as the shutters close, and it’s decidedly strange to watch as his internals slow to a stop, as the only thing in Drift’s frame retaining power is the laser core and spark-chamber within, but Ultra Magnus puts it out of mind, no matter how disturbingly close it is to death. Drift’s not grey yet.

He begins tearing the mesh patch into pieces and reaching – _into Drift –_ to wrap the magnetising patches around the leaking fuel lines, stopping Drift from losing his energon at the fast rate he was before. Then he lifts Drift’s frame into his arms, and sometimes the mental disconnect between how large the Ultra Magnus Armour is and how small Minimus Ambus is still trips him up, even after all this time, but he shoves it aside. He begins to make his way to the med-bay, back through the energon-stained corridors.

Ultra Magnus pulls up the officer channel and reports into it, _/ One casualty inbound, Ratchet. Severe energon loss, ruptured fuel lines, abdominal perforation. Only received emergency patches. I’m bringing him to you directly. /_ He doesn’t say that it’s Drift on the officer channel, Rodimus doesn’t need to be distracted from his own fight, but he does comm Ratchet’s personal line, _/ It’s Drift. /_

Ratchet’s swearing is vicious. _/_ _Get him here! /_ he snaps, before then reluctantly adding, _/ Give him to First Aid. /_

Ultra Magnus internally raises an optical ridge at that – he’s aware that Drift and Ratchet have some sort of history, though not what it entails – but he acknowledges Ratchet and closes the channel. At least Ratchet knows that medics shouldn’t perform surgeries on mecha they’re close to.

_Or,_ Ultra Magnus amends, _at least the situation is that our medics aren’t_ _ **forced**_ _to perform surgeries on mecha they’re close to,_ _due to lack of other options_ _._

Ultra Magnus still isn’t sure if this quest to find the Knights of Cybertron is the answer to their post-war mess Rodimus seems to desperately want it to be, but – at least people’s hands aren’t being forced the same way they have been for four million years. It’s a sign that things are trying their best to head the right way, and Ultra Magnus will take it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Ultra Magnus + Drift part of the Rodimus + Ultra Magnus + Drift command triad was _so under utilised_ , by Primus. (Rossum's Trinity, baby. I will one day write a fic for you guys as well.)
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	11. Defiance | G1 | Hot Rod + Galvatron

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: mind control, slavery, Actual Robot Satan, background war, implied/referenced xenocide, unreality, Lovecraftian horror elements, implied body modification, past character death.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 11 : Psych 101**

**Defiance | Struggling | Crying**

–

**G1 Hot Rod + Galvatron**

–

So. It turns out that walking through the interiors of your species’ literal Evil God of Chaos is not such a great idea, to say the least. Even if he’s supposedly busy with trying to eat your planet.

Hot Rod’s internal chronometer stopped working properly the moment he lost sight of the outside world, the expanse of stars and the ruin of Cybertron. He wavered in place a moment, looked back, but couldn’t see where he had come from. He’s still certain that the halls behind had been different, but he can’t really remember what they were supposed to have looked like, only that there should have been a way outside close by, but when he went back there was nothing.

He wonders where the others are, if they’re safe. They’re probably not – Hot Rod himself doesn’t feel very safe – but hopefully they’re not _wandering_ like he is. There are stories, old ones, the ones only Kup tells, ones even he says are just fairy-tales, that talk about mysterious places where the Unmaker’s anti-creation, his _unreality,_ bleeds into the real world and causes nothing but sorrow and fear. Hot Rod had never believed them before – one only needed to gaze out upon the remnants of Cybertron, the cities in ruin, corpses grey and rusting still where they fell millions of years ago to see _horror,_ but – maybe there was more truth to those tales than even Kup knew.

Time stretches, compresses, and sometimes his chronometer tells him it’s been only minutes, and sometimes it tells him it’s been years, and once it even told him a date for _before_ he ended up in here. Hot Rod uneasily puts it out of mind; he took a few hits on his, the Dinobots’ and Kup’s fraught trip to Cybertron, and any one of those could have sent the mechanism glitching. It – means nothing. Yeah. _Nothing._

So he walks, and walks, and walks. There’s nothing Hot Rod’s ever done that’s quite like moving through these silent spaces; they’re too silent. There should be the rumble of internals, the sound of pistons and gears, something to indicate that what he’s inside is a living mech, but – Hot Rod is unsure whether the embodiment of Darkness, the brother of Primus, who is Light and Life… actually, like, _counts_ as a living mech in any way that matters. He’d certainly _looked it,_ from the outside, but…

It’s so quiet it’s eerie. Even Hot Rod’s own footsteps are muffled somehow, like sound waves dare not travel far in here. His own internal systems seem quietened, too. Everything is reporting as within normal parameters in his HUD, but when Hot Rod clasps his hands together, they are cold and still, not even the natural tiny vibrations of his engine and such travelling through his frame are perceivable. His EM field flickers oddly, when he’s not paying attention.

His paint seems muted, somehow, in a way that Cybertronian colour nanites shouldn’t be capable of. It’s difficult to see in the dim light, but he’s certain of it. He’s still magenta and orange and yellow, but he’s no longer _bright,_ no longer glossy. He looks like a human vehicle left outside in the burning sun for decades, the paint faded by the UV rays. At least he’s not grey.

(He pushes away the thought that tacks on _Yet.)_

He needs to find the Matrix. He needs to find _Galvatron._

So he shores up his courage, squares his shoulders, and keeps moving, long past the point where base coding instinct begs for him to stop, to find some place to hide, to run like a coward and live to die another day.

Well, Hot Rod is _not_ a coward, and if he _is_ to die today, then it will be fighting for his people’s survival, for his planet’s, and for all those who have already fallen to Unicron, entire species and cultures wiped straight out of existence in between the sharp metal points of the Devourer’s ever-hungry gaping maw. No more.

–

Naturally, it is Galvatron who finds him first.

Hot Rod is slinking through a room – well, they’re not really _rooms,_ since this is a gigantic planet-sized mech he’s inside of, but they are _spaces,_ perhaps, large enough to be rooms and halls and corridors and Hot Rod doesn’t have another word for them, okay? – with great cables coiling around, large enough to drive inside if he were in them, but he’s instead clambering around them and trying to make his way towards another exit when the voice speaks up from the shadows.

“Autobot,” says the voice, cutting through the heavy gloom and strange blue-silver light with a resonance that startles Hot Rod.

He whips around, triple barrel forearm lasers primed and pointed ahead in the direction of the dark shape lurking between two pipes. The other steps forward, out of the heavy shadows, so thick they seem to have weight to them, seem to _cling,_ reluctant to let go, and, oh.

“ _Galvatron!”_ Hot Rod snarls. His own voice is quieter, though not for lack of trying. It sounds like he’s talking from three rooms away, even to his own audios.

The new Decepticon leader pins him with a look, and it’s not Hot Rod imagination that Galvatron is having a far easier time moving and talking than he is, right? If Hot Rod’s trying to push through in a place that insists he doesn’t belong, then Galvatron is right at home, as per his Unicronian origins, most likely.

Hot Rod looks at the Matrix strung on a chain around Galvatron’s neck. Its blue and gold structure reflects the strange light oddly, but in Galvatron’s hands it is dark and cold, nothing at all like how it had glowed earlier, when Hot Rod had caught it after Optimus –

Hot Rod pushes the memory away. It’s painful and it hurts and it’s important to remember, but – it’s no use to him here.

“After something, Autobot?” Galvatron asks, and – it sounds like he’s going for _taunting,_ but he’s not quite managing to reach it.

“The Matrix,” Hot Rod says, though he doesn’t doubt that Galvatron already knows that.

“It will do you no good, Autobot,” Galvatron says, something heavy in his tone, something almost – defeated. “It cannot be opened.”

“Not by a Decepticon,” Hot Rod retorts, because it is, after all, the _Autobot Matrix._

Galvatron sneers, then says grudgingly, “Like it or not, we are allies now, against a common foe.”

Hot Rod’s about to open his mouth and ask what Galvatron’s talking about – since last he heard, Galvatron was serving Unicron quite _enthusiastically,_ and, nope, he’s not thinking about how this mech just – _killed_ Ultra Magnus, like it was _nothing,_ earlier, and Hot Rod _aches_ at the thought of the Junkions not being able to bring back Magnus, except they _did_ , so why does it still _hurt?_ – but a bright red light suddenly flooding the room stops him.

“ _ **Destroy him now, Galvatron,”**_ echoes a voice from everywhere, all around them, and Hot Rod has never heard such a great and terrible voice, its very sound freezes his spark, makes it quiver with a primal fear, _**“or you yourself will be obliterated.”**_

Galvatron is clutching his head, writhing in place, and then he chokes out through a vocaliser laced with pain-induced static, “Of course, my master,” before the red light dims and Galvatron aims his plasma cannon at Hot Rod, firing it with a too-bright flash of light.

Hot Rod leaps out of the way – the plasma blast is fast, but the moment the cannon requires to gather the energy and get ready to fire is enough to take advantage of – and thinks _Master?_

And then he thinks _Freedom is the right of all sentient beings_ but he isn’t thinking it in his voice, he’s thinking it in Optimus’, and perhaps it isn’t so much a thought that he’s thinking on his own, as a series of words dropped into his head from an outside source, like the raspberry jam Daniel likes being dolloped onto his breakfast toast.

(Okay, not the most Cybertronian of imagery, but Hot Rod’s been assigned to guardian duty long enough that he has more of a grasp on Earth culture and customs than many of the Autobots who’ve been there for decades longer have. Plus, he _likes_ Daniel, and if Unicron consumes Cybertron, then Earth is next on his list, and then Hot Rod won’t have just lost one home, he’ll have lost _two.)_

_Unicron is my enemy, Galvatron is just his **slave,**_ Hot Rod realises as he ducks around the room, avoiding Galvatron’s shots and taunts. _He wanted to be **allies.**_

A thought embeds itself in his mind, and just like the previous one, it speaks in Optimus’ voice: _Get the Matrix. Open it. Challenge Unicron directly._

_I will, Optimus,_ Hot Rod thinks back. He knows not if he’s imagining the great Prime, or if some part of his spirit truly does live on inside the Matrix and speaks to him now, but he skitters up into the shadows and waits for Galvatron to come stalking below. _I promise. I won’t fail you._

Galvatron comes by beneath Hot Rod’s hidden perch mere moments later. “Come out, puny Autobot,” he says, but the words are rote, learnt. “You lack even Prime’s courage.”

Hot Rod drops on him from above.

There’s a scuffle, of course there is, but Hot Rod’s hands grip onto the Matrix easy enough, and it begins to _shine._

Galvatron roars in pain at the light, and Hot Rod uses the opportunity to get off and away from him. Unicron’s Herald is no small enemy, but – he doesn’t have to be.

From within the Matrix, Hot Rod can feel the power emanating out, like standing at an open door and watching a lightning storm roll in, feeling the static over his EM field. But it’s all concentrated down, clasped in his hands, and he cries out, speaking with a dozen voices at once, “Unicron! I challenge you!”

There’s tears streaming down his face, leaking freely from his optics. Kup once told him that some stories said mecha would cry in the presence of Primus, and the Matrix is glowing hot and bright in his hands, and tears are rolling but his vision has never been clearer, the Matrix is sweeping away the gloom like smoke before a strong wind, and revealing Hot Rod and Galvatron to the light.

The world around them rumbles, red light flashing from unknown sources, and suddenly the clanking and groaning of internals thrums to life, like Unicron has been pulled down into the realm of mortal mechs, his mysteries swept aside, his illusions shattered. Somewhere, someone is roaring, so loud it’s almost beyond audio range.

“I defy you!” Hot Rod shouts. “You are not welcome here, Eater of Worlds! You will not destroy Cybertron! You will not devour the Children of Primus! And you _will not_ enslave any sentient being in all of creation!”

Galvatron is on the ground, clutching his head, his mouth open with a constant low-level scream, but his red optics _burn_ into Hot Rod’s blue.

The room around them – the mech, the _god –_ shakes even more, metal expanses cracking, shearing apart, pipes bursting open, and, Primus, is Unicron _imploding?_

Hot Rod barely gets the chance to register that before Galvatron is lurching up from the ground, too much like a puppet on strings and not enough like a mech, and launching himself towards Hot Rod, grappling for the Matrix. They collapse together, roll over, the Matrix skittering away several metres, Galvatron’s hands wrapped tight around Hot Rod’s throat, trying to rupture the critical cables and wires there, either to disconnect his processor from his frame, or just perforate the energon lines and have him bleed out on the floor.

Hot Rod looks up, directly into Galvatron’s red optics, his burning, pained optics, and says, wheezing, staticky, perhaps more mouths the words than anything else, _“Fight him.”_

And Galvatron does, struggling against the iron pincer Unicron has gripped around his mind in one last attempt to destroy the Matrix before he himself is destroyed. “Master… master…” Galvatron grits out, loosening his hands, pulling them away, twisting and turning his head.

Hot Rod scrambles out from under him. He wants to comfort – Galvatron is so clearly _in pain –_ but he goes to the Matrix instead, lifts it up…

“ _**A r i s e , R o d i m u s P r i m e . ”**_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Am I back at it again with my GalvRod undertones bullshit? Yes, yes I am.
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	12. Broken Trust | IDW | Rodimus Prime + Thunderclash

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: background war and war crimes, complicated aftermath of civil war, post-traumatic stress disorder being something pretty much every character has, implied/referenced non-consensual memory modification, mutiny, implied/referenced emotional abuse, abandonment of responsibilities, not-quite cultural erasure but definitely shading that direction.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 12 : I Think I’ve Broken Something**

**Broken Down | ~~Broken Bones~~ | Broken Trust**

–

**IDW Rodimus Prime + Thunderclash**

–

Thunderclash spots a flash of red in his peripheral vision, fast movement, and turns on long battlefield instinct just in time to catch the last glimpse of Rodimus ducking out of the room, obviously trying to avoid drawing attention.

He hesitates. Rodimus is… not the fondest of him, even Thunderclash knows that. It’s even entirely deserved, at this point, considering the whole – _mutiny_ thing. Even so, his gaze lingers on the closed door, and he aches to follow, to go lend his aid if needs be, in whatever form that takes.

Chances are that Thunderclash is the last person Rodimus would want following him out of a room he’s trying to escape and asking if he’s okay. Well, maybe not the _last,_ but Thunderclash is quietly, sadly certain that he’s pretty far down the list.

Thunderclash looks back to the front of the room. Megatron is taking his turn to talk now, Ultra Magnus already finished, Rodimus long gone, and he’s going on about _second chances,_ and how this new universe is a fresh start, and how they’re all going to have to pull together because there’s no longer a Cybertron – _any_ Cybertron, New _or_ Old – to go back to. The _Lost Light_ and its crew are now officially on their own, forever cut off from their entire history, their culture, their people… all the bad things gone, all the good things gone, _everything._

Thunderclash is still uncertain exactly how he feels about it.

He doesn’t – regret, exactly. At least, not yet. But now that the whipped up atmosphere of the _Final Lap_ is gone, now that the exhilaration of just – _breaking free,_ going their own way, has faded… Thunderclash is not sure how to proceed from here.

Any mech is brave in a crowd, when the cheers are roaring, when the music’s playing loud, and when there’s a feverish excitement in being _together,_ one mind in many bodies. _‘Til All Are One_ is entrenched deep into the Cybertronian collective psyche, and it’s well documented that their species are one of the known (and now also the _unknown)_ galaxies’ most vulnerable to mob mentality, herd mentality, whatever the most in-vogue psychologists want to call it at any given moment.

It’s part of how Megatron stirred the rightfully angry undercurrent into action, and then how he turned his freedom fighters into a genocidal army; he knew exactly how to play them, how to keep that frenzy going, keep them all going well past the point where any outsider could recognise the horrors and say _stop,_ but things aren’t so easy when you’re on the inside, are they?

Thunderclash has recently got a reminder of that in the form of _Getaway_ and the mutiny he went along with. So what if memory modification and deception got churned into the mix? Thunderclash still took that first step, still _agreed_ with the first pitch he got.

_I thought we were just dumping Megatron,_ Thunderclash thinks, his chest heavy and sore, though the monitors always attached to his damaged spark chamber do not report anything awry. _I didn’t – the situation was more complicated than I thought._

Thunderclash should have known better. If nothing else, he wasn’t – still isn’t – a part of the _Lost Light’s_ command team, and he’s held rank for long enough – most of the war, to be honest – that he knows intimately how intel works. The captain and their commanders are privy to information that the general crew are not, and decisions get made based on it; sometimes with explanations, sometimes without, and most of the time it’s somewhere in the middle.

Thunderclash knows that the majority of complaints from mecha not in the know are rooted in things that have already been examined, weighed up, and, when taken within the context of all the stuff the general crew isn’t cleared to know, are simply not viable somehow, even if it isn’t immediately clear how to someone on the outside.

No matter what he saw, what he heard, what he _thought…_ he regrets not trusting in his captain, in _Rodimus._ And even if mecha have _things_ to say about his Prime, then they should have trusted in Ultra Magnus, who has been one of the Autobot kingpins since the very start, no matter who was underneath the armour.

_Regrets, regrets, regrets._ Will Thunderclash ever be free of them? Will _anyone?_

But he’s learnt, long and hard, that _inaction_ causes just as many regrets as action. And he’s determined not to make turning away from something the cause of any more of his regrets.

Thunderclash ducks out of the room, perhaps a minute or so after Rodimus, turning on his infrared optical mods to track the footsteps left behind from his captain’s higher-than-normal temperature frame.

–

Thunderclash tracks Rodimus all the way to the upper observation deck, situated almost directly above the bridge and bow facing. It’s not a room that many of the general crew go to, preferring the larger port and starboard observation decks along the sides. Thunderclash has long known (he’s more observant a mech than most give him credit for) that Rodimus tends to choose this one, though, due to the fact that he feels close to his command crew in the bridge below and at ease in the more private setting. For all his sociability, Rodimus is actually a rather private mech.

Thunderclash hesitates outside the door. Once he goes in, there’s no going back. Rodimus would never believe that Thunderclash didn’t follow him here intentionally, even if Thunderclash were not a truly terrible liar. So he in-vents, ex-vents, steels up that famed courage, and places a hand to the door panel.

Rodimus looks around, startled, at the sound of the swishing door. The lights inside are dimmed down low, and Thunderclash must be nothing more than a dark silhouette back-lit by the brighter lights of the corridor, but –

“Thunderclash,” Rodimus says, unerringly picking out just who it is that has followed him. It must be by shape alone, for Thunderclash’s EM field is still too far away to brush against Rodimus’.

“Captain,” Thunderclash replies with a nod. He lingers a moment in the doorway, and then walks inside, letting it slide shut again behind him, making the room feel private again. He continues awkwardly. “I saw you – leave.”

Rodimus watches Thunderclash step steadily closer. “And you thought you would follow?”

Thunderclash tries not to feel like he’s approaching an angry, cornered mechanimal, and doesn’t quite succeed. Rodimus has this – energy – about him, something restless shifting beneath his exterior, and it puts in mind something teetering on its breaking point, one wrong step away from lashing out at the next hand, heedless as to whether it reaches to harm or to heal. “I was… concerned.”

Rodimus snorts. It’s an ugly sound. “Concerned? Don’t make me laugh.”

Thunderclash steps closer – Rodimus is standing by the large window, and Thunderclash is nearly next to him, now – and reaches out a hand, but stops, his arm hovering in the air. Rodimus eyes it, bright Matrix-blue in the gloom, and doesn’t reach back. “This is not a laughing matter.”

Rodimus gives him a crooked smile. “Isn’t it?” he asks.

Thunderclash frowns. “Nothing that upsets someone is worthy of being laughed at.”

Rodimus barks out one short snap of bitter laughter. “Go on,” he says, almost challenges, “tell me what you think this is about, then. I’m curious as to what the great Thunderclash thinks he knows.”

Thunderclash represses the urge to wince, but he does answer, because his captain has asked it of him, and Rodimus’ optics may be challenging, but there’s a desperation in them, something that begs for recognition. “There’s a lot of things that have recently happened that never got dealt with before you were deprived of the chance to cut and run instead of facing them.”

Rodimus flinches back.

_Gotcha,_ Thunderclash thinks, but there’s no feeling of victory to go with it.

“Am I the kind of mech you think runs away when things get tough?” Rodimus asks, low and dangerous, going for hurt – and there’s no denying that there _is_ a bit of hurt there, but he’s playing it up, trying to cover for how accurately Thunderclash has hit the nail on the head.

“No,” Thunderclash answers, frank. “You are no coward. You throw yourself into problems head first, without hesitation, searching for a way to make things right. But this is a problem, a _hurt,_ of a personal nature – and for those, you tend to avoid ‘til you can no longer.”

“You think you know me so well?” Rodimus snaps, aggravated.

“I think that the idea of being stuck with Megatron for the foreseeable future has frightened you,” Thunderclash says, unwilling to let Rodimus draw him on in a meaningless run-around of words without ever letting him get to the points he wants to say. Rodimus’ optics widen, but Thunderclash goes on before he can interrupt. “I think that leaving Cybertron for good, with no way back, has shaken you, ripped you from your foundation – _all_ of us from our foundation. I think that all the things left unspoken after the – mutiny – still circle in your processor.”

Rodimus glares at him. “Seems you’ve had a lot on your mind,” he sneers. “And I’m _not_ scared of _Megatron.”_

Thunderclash shutters his optics and carefully cycles a couple of slow vents. “Perhaps I have no right to tell you what you do or do not feel. No, I know I don’t. But – however he may have – _changed –_ both already and going into the future, it doesn’t change how he treated you before. If you are uneasy, then you are not wrong to be. You are not – not _obliged_ to forgive him, no matter his recent actions. They do not cancel out his past ones.”

Rodimus’ optics tighten. “Why say something now, when it’s all over?” he spits out. “Why not before, when – why not before?” _When I could have used someone in my corner?_

Thunderclash looks down at the floor. “Because I did not truly see at the time,” he admits, ashamed to the depths of his damaged spark. “Megatron – all it was was _words,_ and never very attention-grabbing ones. Just – throwaway comments, and – none of them were things that other mecha didn’t say. I know it was different for you, you were the recipient, you heard _everything_ , but for everyone else it sounded like he was just joining in with the crew. Only in hindsight, thinking everything over, did it all light up in red. And – it was _Megatron._ We were all expecting a bit of contention, and nothing that the general crew witnessed seemed to go beyond two colleagues who didn’t like each other but were forced to work together. It didn’t look like abuse. But – I suppose a lot of abuse doesn’t _look like it,_ from the outside _.”_

Rodimus steps back, turns away from him, stares out the viewing window to the stretches of unknown stars. “… I suppose I really _did_ bring the mutiny upon myself, then,” he says, self-deprecating. “If even the general crew didn’t respect me enough to disagree with fragging _Megatron.”_

“No!” Thunderclash says, shocked as he probably shouldn’t be. “Never! You – ” he hesitates.

“Go on,” Rodimus says, not looking. “I what?”

“You are so bright, captain,” Thunderclash says, softly. “So _righteous._ You try so hard, give more of yourself than you should, and – it makes you an easy target, because… most officers are less open, more formal, and your way of leadership is inspiring and wonderful, but it is a double-edged blade. It is easier to place full blame on someone who is willing to take it, who is _charismatic_ like you are, because then if something goes wrong one can just say _oh, I trusted him, he was so_ _ **persuasive,**_ and absolve oneself of all responsibility. It’s not right, and it’s not fair, but that is why a lot of the general crew fell so easily into Getaway’s plan – it was _easy_ to believe in good-intentioned fallacy that you needed to be _saved from,_ than in the idea that you might actually know what you’re doing, not just winging it and hoping for the best.”

Rodimus doesn’t speak for a long silent minute, his shoulders tense. “… I hope you realise that I spend most of my time winging it and hoping for the best,” he says, and Thunderclash knows that he picked that because he needed time to turn the rest around in his processor.

“You really don’t,” Thunderclash gently corrects. “You learnt your decision-making on the battlefield, where snap judgements and immediate action ensure survival. You’re not a graduate of a military academy, not trained in by-rote tactics, and with it you’re _dangerously competent,_ because the way you lead is unpredictable, is tried and tested under fire. You don’t want to waste time trying to explain your thought process, and so on the outside it does look like you’re making it up completely. Don’t do yourself the disservice of not recognising your own strategic genius, captain.”

“I trusted you,” Rodimus says, short, giving voice to something that’s been festering in his chest. “You can talk about _strategic genius_ and _well-intentioned fallacy_ for days, but _I trusted my crew to have my back and you betrayed me._ And – I trusted _you,_ Thunderclash, the _Greatest Autobot of All Time._ I thought you had more _honour._ But I guess you _didn’t.”_

Rodimus stalks out of the room abruptly, dodging Thunderclash’s attempt to reach out, to brush his arm, to maybe stop him and talk more. The door cycles shut behind him.

Thunderclash stands there a moment, aching. Well, that – didn’t exactly go to plan, and what Rodimus said _hurt,_ even if it was true, but – it’s a start.

_At least he’s talking,_ Thunderclash reassures himself. _He’ll heal only after all the contamination has been bled out of the wound._

Thunderclash tries not to linger on the brief glimpse he got of translucent pink tears shining on Rodimus’ faceplates.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One day, I will actually write a decent length fic for ThunderRod, since I actually really like the pairing. Today is not that day.
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	13. Chemical Pneumonia | IDW | Drift + Wing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: implied/referenced war and war crimes, chronic illness, implied/referenced culling/eugenics via unregulated pollution, Functionalism, implied/referenced drug use and drug addiction, implied/referenced circumstances-forced prostitution, implied/referenced gang violence.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 13 : Breathe In Breathe Out**

**~~Delayed Drowning~~ | Chemical Pneumonia | ~~Oxygen Mask~~**

–

**IDW Drift + Wing**

–

Rodion begins as less of a city and more of an extension of Tarn’s overspilling industrial zone. The mines in Tarn are going dry, fast, and the overseers are casting their gaze towards the deposits lying east, in the shadow of the Titanium Plateaus. It’s how cities in Cybertron expand under the reign of the Functionists; spilling outwards, grasping and hungry for more resources. First are the mines, then the foundries, then the factories, and the squat homes for all the workers of each. Rodion is no different in that regard.

By the time Drift comes out of its choked hot spot, Rodion is large enough to have been granted city-state recognition, and for the sprawling factory-filled slum to have its own slum: the Dead End.

Drift is a racer, and there’s no place in Rodion for such slim frame types. Drift is not heavy-weight enough to be made into a miner or factory worker, and not small enough to be shoved easily into a Disposable class function. With no assigned prospects, Drift is cast, still a new-spark, still freshly warm from the hot spot, down into Rodion’s Dead End. His life expectancy should not have him surviving the week.

Drift lives, when all the odds stacked against him dictate that he should not. This will be a reoccurring theme in his life, though he knows it not at the time. Down in the Dead End, he knows only the hunger of empty tanks, the creak of ill-lubricated joints, the grime and rust of the streets, and the ever-present thick smog, waste pollution from the factories hanging heavy in the air, choking and blocking ventilation systems with its poison.

–

The mecha of the Dead End are _ill._ That’s what everyone on the layers above say. And, to be fair, they are not, strictly speaking, _wrong._ Why waste medical resources on the non-contributing parasites, after all?

Drift haunts the streets with his fellow ghosts, the dregs of society washed down the drain, lingering as scum and scale, tarnishing the shining metal. They get pushed down, painted over, but underneath there is still the corrosion, and the Functionists have never been about _fixing things,_ especially things that they can exploit.

Drugs – circuit boosters, syk, others – are more than common down in the Dead End. Nothing seems to stymie the trade for long; in fact, one could say that the mass drugging of the otherwise potentially dangerous rabble is rather _intentional._ But if a mech is hungering after his next hit to soothe the emptiness of his tanks more than he is thinking about how all of this is unfair, then it’s easy to keep a status quo stable.

Drift is no different; whatever it takes to obtain his next high, he does. He has no possessions but his frame to offer – and some would say that he doesn’t even really own that – but down in these murky depths, prostitution and drugs and homelessness are a self-fulfilling prophetic cycle. Drift is a survivalist; he _survives._

But drugs and their effects on a frame are only part of the plethora of medical problems plaguing the Dead End; lack of energon, of course, is the next. Lack of maintenance another. But most down here – if they do not fall victim to starvation, overdose, or just good old-fashioned violence so typical of the gangs, cartels and enforcers that each call the Dead End their territory – die the painful deaths typically related to infections in their frames.

Rust infections tend to spread from the ventilation systems inwards, eventually corroding the living metal of a Cybertronian from the inside out, burrowing insidiously deeper, until even the laser core and spark chamber are compromised, giving out, giving way, and the spark held within destabilising and dispersing. Death, in other words.

The pollution and smog from the factories, the lack of hygiene options available to the mecha down here, the lack of street clearance… it’s a pit of sickness down in the Dead End. You don’t even need to be able to see the grimy buildings to know; just _listen._ Can’t you hear the sound of laboured ventilations? Can’t you hear the rough coughing, failing to clear blocked and corroded filters? Can’t you hear the creaks of frames falling into first disrepair and then _pieces_ with their owners still stuck inside them?

(Can’t you hear the crying?)

–

Drift claws his way out eventually, under the weighted red gaze of a mech named _Megatron._

The Decepticons begin as a rag-tag group of low-caste or casteless mecha; miners and factory workers and beastformers and seekers and any and every type of frame the Functionists relegate down and trap under the lower layers, or else in contracts so restrictive they’re slaves in all but name. The Disposable class isn’t in named existence any more, but their few rights haven’t changed much. Nobody here is used to owning themselves.

There are no medics, not official, properly-trained ones. There’s a lot of learnt-on-the-spot knowledge, passed-by-word-of-mouth tricks going around, though, and the miners make sure that Drift – now Deadlock – gets his filters changed. The dust and gases of the mines are little different than the chemical smog of Rodion, and Megatron holds Deadlock through the shaking aftermath of having such vital and sensitive systems fixed as best they can with make-shift procedures.

It’s good. Deadlock’s never vented easier in his life, except maybe right back at the start, when his frame was warm and new. It’s also, unfortunately, a bit like shutting the blast door _after_ the explosion has already seared by. The occasional coughing tapers off some, but doesn’t stop. Deadlock doesn’t even register it as a potential problem; he’s been choking his whole life.

–

The war begins, as it must. By now, this civil war is such a multi-versal constant, it would be more unusual for it not to occur.

Deadlock doesn’t know this, however. He is not yet at the point where alternate universes and timelines are a factor in his every day existence. Instead, he does his best to fight for a Decepticon victory, perching high on perilous sniper nests, prowling through ruined streets, checking and rechecking set patrols on the Decepticon supply lines, looking down the barrel of his blaster and taking the shot at any mech who wears a red face on their chest.

The war envelopes Cybertron, and this is one of the universes where it leaves the planet, spreading throughout the known galaxies, turning systems into slaughterhouses and neutral species into enemies. Deadlock follows the tide, swept along in campaigns and raids, and if he wheezes sometimes, if his frame trembles and shakes from an inner weakness when under stress, if the coating of dust in his vents affects him more severely than many around him, well… Deadlock’s not one to admit a vulnerability, and within the Decepticon fold is definitely not the place for it.

Still, though the horrors unveiling keep him awake more than he really wants, and his audios ring with the echoes of bombardments for hours after the artillery fire has stopped, there’s a strange familiarity to the drudgery of war; the noxious fumes of the battlefields feel a bit like coming home.

–

It isn’t until New Crystal City that the problem finally gets recognised, and even then not right away.

Drift is put through a partial rebuild, but anything that was salvageable was left alone; New Crystal City is, after all, supposed to be _secret._ Resources are not _scarce,_ but they are _rationed._ Dai Atlas never lets medical supplies run low, but why waste the parts if the old ones seem all right?

It’s Wing who ends up dragging Drift back to Redline, eventually.

“That cough of yours is really not right,” Wing says, worriedly. “Is there a problem?”

Drift looks up from where he’d been bent over, hands on his knees, hacking and spluttering, practice blades abandoned in the dirt. Training with practice swords is entirely different to training with blasters. More physical, for one thing, and his systems have never been all that great at intense physical labour. Racing in his alt mode is fine; dancing about a sparring ground in close combat is something else entirely.

“I’m fine,” Drift says, when his vocaliser feels like cooperating again. He’s even being truthful, rather than prideful.

“You’re really not,” Wing replies, stepping closer, reaching out a hand as if to touch Drift’s shoulder pauldron. He stills at Drift’s bared teeth, arm hovering in the air a moment before he withdraws it, nodding apologetically. “It doesn’t sound right. Sparring shouldn’t be doing this to your frame.”

“I _said_ I’m _fine,”_ Drift snarls, before digging himself straight into a hole by adding on, “I’ve done this my whole life, it’s _nothing.”_

“Yeah, we’re going to Redline,” Wing says, tone brooking no arguments. Drift is bundled back off to Redline’s clinic, sneering and snapping all the way.

–

“Chronic chemical-induced pneumonitis,” Redline diagnoses after several increasingly-invasive tests. “It’s – not good. It’s compromised your internals down to the outer laser-core. Any farther, and your spark chamber would be infected, and there’s no coming back from that one.”

Drift sits on the medical berth and stays silent. Wing is standing off to the side – Drift had given his consent for him to be there, because New Crystal City apparently had this thing called _medical confidentiality_ which Drift had been sure was a thing that only applied to the higher castes and never any Decepticon – and his face tightens, mouth thinning.

Wing glances over, sees that Drift is not going to say anything, and asks, “What would be needed to repair it?”

Redline looks over the x-rays and scans on his monitor, sighs, and replies, “A full replacement of over half of his internals, about 68% I’d say. His struts are fine, and so are the systems recently installed in his rebuild, but the rest… how old are you, Drift? I’ve been meaning to ask for your medical records, but this is a long-term chronic infection. A lot of this damage started a long time ago – I can see it got slowed by replacement filters at some point, but the infection went farther than those, so it only delayed its spread. How long, Drift?”

Drift thinks of the brief glimpse he got of the stars above before he was forced into the lower layers, the thick smog hanging over him becoming a permanent fixture, the way some of the other homeless mecha had rust falling off them in flakes before they themselves fell to pieces. “About three and a half million years,” he answers. “Don’t know the exact date of forging. Know I was ‘bout four to five hundred thousand when the war broke out proper.”

Redline frowns. “They should have recorded the date on your records in the registration office,” he says.

Drift laughs. He can’t help it. “Redline, I came out of Rodion’s hot spot,” he says, a bitter smile twisting his face. “And I wasn’t big an’ heavy enough to be a labourer, or small an’ light enough to be office-ware. Got cast down to the Dead End still warm. I never _had_ a record of my existence. To them, I _didn’t_ exist.”

“… I suppose that’ll be where all those chemicals got into you,” Redline says after a moment, clearly not knowing what the correct response to what Drift just said is. Drift isn’t surprised; Rodion’s infamous Dead End has long been said to be one of the _worst_ places pre-war Cybertron had to offer.

“The fumes from the factories weren’t regulated,” Drift agrees. “To be honest, I think they liked it that way: we all died off quicker when we were falling into little rusted pieces between syk hits.” Redline grimaces, holds up his scanner, and clearly goes to ask, but – Drift interrupts, “I’ve been off syk and boosters for millions of years,” he says. “Probably got some physical problems from ‘em left over, but – nothing current, nothing recent.”

Redline nods, laying his scanner back down. “I’ll schedule you in for surgery,” he says. “It’ll be intense – we might have to do several. You’ll probably have to take medications for a good long while, since your protoform has been damaged. Now go, shoo, I’ll send you the details once I’ve requisitioned the parts. And by the light of Primus, _no sparring._ Nothing physically demanding, do you hear me, Drift? Do you hear me, _Wing?”_

“No sparring,” Wing nods. “Gotcha, Redline.”

Drift shifts in place, frowning – he’d _liked_ sparring, even if he’s _never_ going to admit such to Wing – but nods as well. “Yes, Redline.”

Redline ushers them out. As they walk along the streets, Drift wonders if Wing is going to say anything, going to say something like _didn’t know you were a Dead End siphonist, I want you out of my house you filthy whore,_ but he doesn’t. Most of Drift knows Wing wouldn’t – he’s not that kind of mech – but even amongst the lowest of the low, those from the Dead End have a – reputation.

“Want to pick up some rental holos on our way home?” Wing asks, breaking the quiet. “Since we’re going to be stuck inside for a while.”

_Our way home._ Wing called his house Drift’s _home._ Drift shutters his optics, vents wheezing as he walks, tight with restrained emotion. “Yeah,” he says. “I think I’d like that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How do you do robot illness? I've given it my best shot :')
> 
> Ratchet didn't catch the illness back in the Dead End for a reason known as Plot Hole The Author Didn't Think About Until Several Days Later. Just - hand wave it, guys. _Haandd waavvee ~~_
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	14. Branding | IDW | Hot Rod

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: implied/referenced war, implied/referenced genocide, self-isolation-induced mental instability, depression, self-harm via branding, suicidal thoughts, disillusionment with a religious figure, PTSD.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 14 : Is Something Burning?**

**Branding | ~~Heat Exhaustion~~ | Fire**

–

**IDW Hot Rod**

–

Nyon is gone.

It still doesn’t feel _real,_ though Primus knows that Hot Rod saw the flames, the smoke, the _ruins_ himself. ~~Saw the~~ ~~ _corpses._~~

Hot Rod’s shaking, frame trembling outside of his control, and nothing he does seems able to still him. He feels like he should be cold, shivering with shock, but he’s not. He’s warm. Always warm, his Functionist-disapproved Outlier abilities keeping that super-heated energon pumping through his lines from forging ‘til, assumedly, his death. And no matter what hideous thoughts slip through his mind in the days after, he is not dead yet.

He lingers there, amongst the dangerous wreckage. Orion Pax and his _Autobots_ had tried to get him to go with them, but Hot Rod had refused. There’s no way he’s going off to get pressured into becoming an _Autobot,_ no matter what Pax tries to say. The Autobots are still, for now at least, an extension of the Senate, of the _Functionist Council,_ and there’s no way that Hot Rod is spending any more time than he has to with the organisation who’ve been oppressing them for decades now, and whose previous leader – fragging _Zeta Prime –_ tried to use the lives of all the Nyonites to power his Omega Destructors, which are weapons of mass destruction if Hot Rod’s ever seen one.

He steers clear of the Decepticons, too. It’s – something’s wrong with them. He doesn’t know _what,_ but he has good intuition, and – something about Megatron sets all his base-coding instincts on end. It should be strange, perhaps, considering how many of his fellow resistance members joined up, how Hot Rod’s millennia of insurgency already makes him a Decepticon in pretty much every way but name, but –

He avoids them, everyone, slinking into the dusty, scorched ruins, heedless of those who are seeking him out.

–

Nyon’s last census put its population at 17,859 mecha. There are 327 survivors – 328 if you count Hot Rod – and the statistics make something inside Hot Rod crumble.

He turns away, numb, from the flickering monitor he managed to wrestle into life, the screen cracked and pixelating, the connection to the planetary holo-net more than a bit unstable. He’s inside one of the ruins – the remains of an office building – and the back-up generator is enough to get the lights buzzing on and the jerry-rigged system up and running.

Perhaps it was unwise to search up the news articles for Nyon’s destruction, but – he’d _had to know._

There’s still the possibility of mecha stuck in stasis-lock buried beneath the rubble – Cybertronians are rather hardy that way, they could live on like that for _millennia –_ but the sheer scale of the destruction is immense, and the chances of any more survivors being pulled out of the wreckage are achingly low. Hot Rod had been thorough when settling the charges, lining them all up around the support pillars of each layer, calculating the most efficient blast radius… too thorough. He – _regrets._

(It was supposed to be a last resort. It was supposed to be an _it’ll never really come to th_ _is_ _._ It was – it was –

It was a finger on a button, and it was the press inwards, and it was the click.

It was the _screams.)_

There are at least 17,531 people dead, directly at Hot Rod’s hands. Probably more. Nyon was an interstellar trading port, the huge markets the only jewel left in its battered and dented crown. And, yeah, likely some of the mecha who were counted on the census were _away_ from Nyon at the time of its near-total annihilation, but they would have been outnumbered by those coming in from the outside who were caught up in Zeta’s madness and Hot Rod’s desperation.

17,531. Likely more. A lot more.

The Cybertronians have never been a large race, sitting at a number of around 280 million. Compared to most other races, whose numbers rank up in the _billions?_ No, they are not numerous, and with the hot spots gone cold and the spark-splicing program mysteriously stopped… the only way the number changes is when it _decreases._

And Hot Rod has just, single-handedly, struck his species a grievous blow.

–

He wants to know. He can’t live not knowing.

So he trawls through the wreckage – it’s been months now, and those who were searching have given up – and in between his foraging for supplies, for fuel and coolant and all those other little things that remind you that you exist in the world, that you’re not just a wandering perspective, ghosting through a nightmare – Hot Rod searches for the answers he wants.

Here and there, in the remnants of hotel computer systems and the inter-stellar marketplace overseers, scattered about in a thousand places, Hot Rod searches for the numbers the news doesn’t report. The others he killed.

In the end, after – too long – he finally places the final number, as close to it as he can manage.

20,312.

He scores it first into his mind, repeating it to himself under his breath, like a chant, like a mantra, in the dark cycle before he powers down and in the early morning dusty light when he powers up. Twenty thousand, three hundred and twelve. Twenty thousand, three hundred and twelve. _Twenty thousand, three hundred and twelve._

Hot Rod wanders the ruins, as he has done for decades. There was a commotion some years back, not too long after Nyon first – fell – over by the Acropolex. Hot Rod hadn’t been near, at the time, hadn’t been able to stand being anywhere near that part of the ruined city. But he’d seen, from the distance, as the newest Prime proved old Nyonic oral legends true: there really _was_ a Titan sleeping under the city.

(Hot Rod remembers the inscription on the floor of the Acropolex: _True freedom exists when all are one._ Optimus Prime has gone on public record stating his own, apparently Matrix-given, interpretation of the old prophecy as already being fulfilled, as _‘Til All Are One_ means only that the Matrix views all Cybertronians as _One_ already.

Hot Rod’s not sure if he likes the way that Prime then goes on to say that fighting for unity amongst their species – which is the most common interpretation of the _all shall be one_ prophecy – is therefore not his true calling as a Prime. Okay, the Matrix considering all Cybertronians equal in its sight? Great! Someone tell the fragging Functionists. But abandoning even _trying_ for any form of unity in the _real, physical world?_ Just because it’s apparently already true in the spiritual one? Yikes.

Justice and peace are things that the _living_ should be concerned with, in Hot Rod’s opinion. Just saying that everything will be all right because once someone dies Primus will straighten them out is just – ugh – it _totally defeats the point!_ It removes responsibility and accountability for stopping cruel acts and crimes! Yeah, everyone likes to make _the Functionists paid good money to reserve their seats in the Pit_ jokes, but if that means that people won’t bother to put them on trial while they’re still alive, then _where is the justice?!_

Hot Rod looks down at the ruins before him, hand pressed flat on his chest, over his spark chamber. He imagines plucking it out, cracking it open, letting his spark gutter like spent flames, like the fires that took years to burn out in Nyon.

_Where is the_ _**justice**_ _?)_

–

Giving voice to the fatal total, often and repeatedly, soon isn’t enough.

Hot Rod starts to desire a more… _permanent_ means of ensuring that he never forgets what he did.

Nyon’s surface and upper layers are nothing but a sea of desolation, and it’s often hard to tell what metal pieces were buildings, and what metal pieces – shattered to the ground, broken beyond repair – were _people._ Finding bits of mecha isn’t uncommon; more than once, Hot Rod’s been picking his way through the unstable wreckage and stepped on a piece of glass, looked down at the splintering sound, and seen someone’s optic lying alone, separated from the rest of their face by the force of the explosions.

(Hot Rod’s ability to hold his tanks has risen considerably in these last decades. It’s not that these horrors don’t deserve that type of visceral reaction, they do, it’s just that fuel is scarce enough without purging it back up half-processed. He can’t afford to lose too much. Things haven’t changed, that way.)

Hot Rod drifts through Nyon, the city’s own ghost, and thinks of fire. Thinks of _burning._

His frame – with its super-heated energon and it’s nigh-fire-resistant mechanics – is a taunt Hot Rod lives with, lives _in._

_You don’t burn. You, who burnt everyone else into ashes._

It’ll be hard – but. Possible. And Hot Rod doesn’t have anything left to lose but his life, and, well.

That’s not worth much, is it?

–

He finds a small space in one of the deeper layers, the ones left uninhabited millions of years ago, their walls still inscribed with glyphs now illegal. The cull didn’t reach everywhere; Nyonites took silent pride in burying their history like treasure caches where no Functionist could ever find it, rather than have it excised away by their sharp optics and clipped new words.

Hot Rod descends deep down, and there is nothing here but dust and faint debris and the murals painting colour and glory on to sweeping metal walls, hidden beneath a layer of rusty grime. He thinks of wiping it away, revealing it to the world that won’t see it anyway, but he doesn’t. Glorifying the past is a dangerous game to play; it implicitly forbids working for a brighter future. Hot Rod hopes that, someday, the Functionists will be nothing but the past, and he doesn’t want to think of glorifying _them._

The room is dark, to begin with. Hot Rod’s aware that it would be more symbolic to have the only light be his exposed spark and the fire, but – he’s looking to _live and remember,_ not _die and forget._ So he sets up a portable generator, wired into the battered strip lights he attaches to the ceiling, and he lays out a med-kit, all before he lights the fire.

He’s made a dent in the floor – there was already a dent, but he’s made it a bigger one, a deeper one – and in it he’s poured flammable liquid in a shallow pool, the type designed for use in braziers in temples. He, in fact, took it from the fractured remains of one, the stained glass windows spread in a hundred thousand pieces across the cracked floor.

He clicks his fingers, the ones that pushed the detonator, friction producing sparks, and ignites his Outlier flames, holding his hand alit in the room. Then he flicks his fingers, tossing the fire, and the flammable pool ignites with a _whump,_ producing only the pleasant scented smell typical of oil incense in the temple. It feels strangely fitting.

Hot Rod lowers the metal rod he spent hours shaping into the flames, and lets it burn there ‘til it glows white hot. His frame may be fire-proof, but the sharp edges he carved into the brand will imprint a scar on him forever, scorching the lines clear and deep.

When it’s ready, he opens his chest armour, nobody but himself – and maybe some petro-rats – to hear the sounds of quiet transformation made loud in the silence. Nothing reaches down here, not even the distant rumblings of heavy artillery being used dozens of mecha-miles away, the new constant background symphony of Cybertron.

Hot Rod exposes his laser core, the last structure between the spark chamber and the open air. It’s the last place he can do this safely – well, not _safely,_ but with a decent chance of survival. He doesn’t insert a sensor-net dampening chip into his medical port. He wants – he _needs –_ to feel this pain.

He picks up the rod, looks at the white brand spelling out 20,312 backwards, so that it will be the right way round to read on him, to _see_ his crimes, his shame, and mutes his vocaliser before pulling it towards him and pressing its blazing heat against his laser core.

_Burn, Hot Rod. **Burn.**_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all ever think to yourselves _I'm gonna whump on Roddy even harder than canon does?_ I mean, he canonically both isolated himself for months after Megatron was added to the crew and carved the captaincy election results into his hand, right? So there's _precedent_ for this type of behaviour.
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	15. Possession | IDW | Rodimus Prime + The Matrix of Leadership

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: background war and war crimes, non-consensual possession, almost Lovecraftian horror elements, disillusionment with religion, temporary character death, major character injury, implied/referenced genocide, non-consensual body modification, There's Something Wrong With The Matrix.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 15 : Into The Unknown**

**Possession | Magical Healing | ~~Science Gone Wrong~~**

–

**IDW Rodimus Prime + The Matrix of Leadership**

–

The Matrix burns inside his chest, and Rodimus is so cold.

He’s floating, drifting, losing himself. There are the pinpricks of stars blurring around him, all too far away to give him warmth, to give him anything more than the tease of distant light, of distant skies on planets he has not set pede on, and now never will.

The Matrix burns inside his chest, and Rodimus is so lost.

He’s in pieces, fractured shards of his own frame sloughing away as he spins desolate. The pain is almost too much to perceive; his sensor-nets are so overloaded – and _not_ the good kind of overload – and burnt out, and he can barely tell where one limb ends and another begins, or, in fact, which limbs just… end.

The Matrix burns inside his chest, and Rodimus is so very, very _dead,_ his bright colours turning grey, his spark stuttering and guttering and wavering like a flame now burning out _._

And then he’s not.

–

There’s light. It’s hot and burning and scorching through him, blinding him. It’s a light so bright it’s almost physical, shoving through his helm like a broken rebar, making pain burst behind his optics, maybe even bursting _out_ his optics, the azure blue blazing into pure white, his visual feed rendered useless.

The Matrix in his chest hums, a deep resonant note, the type of sound that could shake a mech apart, turn his frame into a discombobulated pile of struts, wires, bolts and screws, spark chamber and laser core a bright gem in a pile of parts, energon leaking everywhere.

There’s the sense of something – unfolding, maybe. Like how a flower unfolds its petals, only these petals are blades of heat and light and _power,_ and the flower is looking at him, seeing him, _knowing_ him, and it is making a decision.

Rodimus is _deaddeaddead_ – and he belongs now to this unfolding power, his frame holding it steady, his spark within its grasp, and _it won’t let go._ The call of the Afterspark is soft and distant and getting further away, drowned out by the different song of the power in his chest.

It _chooses him._

Later, Rodimus won’t be able to explain it in any way but _it was like getting hit with a dozen harpoons._ Scorching blades of heat and light unfold inside his chest, burrowing their way in – into his struts, into his circuits, into his processor, into his laser core, into his fuel tank, into his engine, into every part of him – and hooking deep. And then they start to _reel him in._

Everything Rodimus is, everything he ever was or ever will be, from his physical frame, to his pulsing spark, to his pain-filled mind, gets concentrated down, pulled into the light, pulled in and _transformed._

The Matrix has the mercy to put him under before the pain gets to the worst part, but sometimes, in the future, Rodimus will awaken, shaking, from a disturbed recharge, and all that he can remember is the fragmented sensations of methodical light stripping him down and remaking him against his will.

–

“When you became one with the Matrix… how did it _feel?”_ Optimus asks him, something wary in his tone.

Rodimus tilts his head, narrows his optics. “How did it feel _honestly?”_

“Between you and me,” Optimus confirms.

“It felt… it felt…” Rodimus stumbles on the words.

_It felt horrifying. It felt wonderful. It felt like my mind was melded straight to the universe and no mortal being was ever meant to perceive that. It was terrifying; it evoked_ _**terror.** _ _It was_ _awful; I was in_ _**awe.** _

Finally, Rodimus settles on, “It felt – like, you know how one time in every million, when you transform, your cog just _sings,_ and changing shape feels as natural as – as – as putting one foot in front of the other? Like that. _That’s_ how it felt.”

_Natural_ doesn’t mean _good._ And it did feel natural – _too_ natural. Like everything that made Rodimus a member of a _civilisation_ was ripped away, leaving him primal, foundational, a force of the universe uncaring of sentient whims – or, perhaps, a _vessel_ for a force of the universe that barely registered sentients because it was _just so big,_ and they were _just so small._

Does a hurricane care for the lives it uproots? No, it only cares for the whirl of the wind and the lash of the rain. Does a volcano care for the air it makes unbreathable? No, it only cares for the fire in its heart and the tumbling of its rocks.

(Does the primordial force of creation care for that which it creates after they have left its domain? Perhaps no one could answer that – but it _does_ care for the balance of the universe, and as are all things created, all things must in turn be _destroyed.)_

No one ever said that nature was _nice._

–

“Are you all right?” Drift asks him quietly, pulling him off to one side.

“You know, you’re the only one who’s asked me that,” Rodimus says.

Drift narrows his optics. “That wasn’t an answer.”

“No,” Rodimus says, truthfully. “I’m not.”

Drift tilts his head, and – like the good friend he is – he sees that Rodimus isn’t yet ready to even begin to face what happened in his own mind, let alone speak it out loud, in whatever words he can find. “When you’re ready to talk, you know I’m here for you.”

Rodimus grips Drift’s hand tight, tries to communicate just how much he appreciates his friend with touch alone, because his intake is all clogged up and his vocaliser is trying to fritz on him. “… Yeah. Thanks.”

Drift raises their joined hands, pulls Rodimus into a hug, presses a kiss against his cheek. He doesn’t press, and Rodimus doesn’t volunteer an answer to Drift’s unspoken questions. He feels it a kindness.

Some things… you are just not _meant_ to know.

–

There’s a fractured half of the Matrix in his chest and Rodimus feels like he’s losing his mind.

There’s a constant – _murmuring –_ skirting along the very edges of his audio range, like hearing someone talk from a couple of corridors away, the sound not quite words but _suggesting_ that they are being spoken and Rodimus is just too far away to parse them.

It doesn’t stop or quiet down, not ever, and soon it follows him into recharge, his dreams becoming smudges of light and darkness and the ever-present murmuring, and sometimes Rodimus feels like he can pick out bits of partial glyphs, but never enough of them to make an educated guess as to what the Matrix is saying.

There’s a cadence to it, though, like singing, maybe.

–

  
When Thunderclash tells him that he once carried the Matrix, however temporarily, Rodimus turns and asks him, placing aside for a moment his need to begrudge everything that Thunderclash is, because what if he could _understand?_ “So how did it feel?”

But Thunderclash chuckles good-naturedly. “Oh, likely not anything like how you or Optimus or any Prime feel it as. It didn’t _choose me,_ I only carried it as a favour to Optimus for a little while. It didn’t – hm. In my unworthy hands, it didn’t feel like much of anything. Warm, maybe. It hummed a little, but nothing more than that.”

“Oh,” Rodimus says. The wordless susurrus in the back of his head gets louder.

Thunderclash tilts his head in askance, but Rodimus doesn’t enlighten him, instead hurrying away rather abruptly. He doesn’t think he can stand another second under Thunderclash’s expectant, wondering gaze.  
  


–  
  


Drift shakes him from recharge one night, still curled up on the sofa in his room, a thermal blanket twisted around him and the vid-screen where they had been watching a holo-film now turned off.

“Drift?” Rodimus asks, his processor emerging from recharge like something being pulled out of mud with a thick squelch. His helm feels heavy, full of steel wool, and his optics adjust to the dim light of Drift’s quarters slower than they should. “Oh, sorry, didn’ mean t’fall ‘nto recharge here.”

Drift’s face is drawn into concern, though. “Roddy,” he says, “you were – chanting. In Primal Vernacular. In your recharge.”

Rodimus opens his mouth, closes it, and says, “… Oh.”

“Roddy,” Drift says, “what is it?”

“I think,” Rodimus starts, and then wonders if he’s really doing this, because this is a lot to dump on Drift. _Drift,_ who holds his faith so close to his spark, who will never want to hear what being a Prime is really like, and isn’t Rodimus _selfish_ for wanting to shatter his trust in higher things, for wanting his comfort? “No, never mind. Don’t worry about it, Drift.”

Drift narrows his optics. Then he sits down on the sofa, helps untangle Rodimus from the thermal blanket he must have put on him earlier, and pulls Rodimus into his side. “I’m here for you,” he says, hooking one arm around Rodimus’ waist, fingers resting on the dim red bio-lights. “And I _am_ worried.”

Rodimus leans into Drift’s side, guiltily soaking in his EM field. “You don’t wanna hear it,” he mumbles.

“I also don’t want my best friend to feel like he can’t talk to me about _anything,”_ Drift replies.

Rodimus fiddles with his fingers, avoiding Drift’s gaze. Drift stays quiet, in full knowledge that he’s gotten through, that Rodimus is just trying to find the will and the words. After a couple of minutes of silence in the room, Rodimus finally whispers, “It’s the Matrix.”

“… The Matrix?” Drift asks, after Rodimus doesn’t elaborate.

“It’s – I don’t know, Drift.” Rodimus – to his own horror – feels optical fluid begin to gather at his shutters. “It’s _doing something._ I can. I can _hear it,_ constantly, all the time. It won’t let me think, it won’t let me recharge, it won’t let me just – _be_ – in peace. And – it’s _frightening,_ Drift. I’m – I’m _frightened.”_

–

The Matrix drains on Luna-1, and for one brief, exhilarating moment, Rodimus thinks that it’s _over._

The murmuring heightens in volume for those critical moments, though Rodimus barely notices it over his own screaming, the universal killswitch’s power coursing through his frame and breaking it apart from the inside out, like the world’s slowest, most grotesque explosion, its awful power juddering through his lines and his struts, sparking in the wires around his helm.

And then it’s over, and he’s hanging limp, and for just one, beautiful moment, the world is blessedly silent. His own head is quiet, in a way it’s not been for years.

And then there is a sound like a bell chime, ringing inside his processor, inside his spark chamber, and Rodimus knows instinctively that no one else can hear it. It chimes again, and in the very depths of his sense of self, something _unfolds._

This time, when the chanting begins, he can understand it.

_You – are – **Chosen** _

_You – who – are – Prime_

_You – who – are – Ascendant_

_You – who – are – Wreathed – In – Flames_

_You – who – are – the – New – Age_

_You – who – are – the – End_

_You – who – are – the – Beginning_

_You – who – are – the – Endless – Circle_

_You – are – **Chosen**_

_You – who – are – Prime_

…

Rodimus stumbles free of the wires, his frame smoking and hot and trying to fall into pieces around him. The chanted statements repeat on a loop in the back of his processor, but there’s no corresponding code to mute them. They’re just – there. And, _frag,_ Rodimus has always wanted to lift his people up high, to help forge a better future, but –

Not like this.

There are people speaking to him, but Rodimus can barely hear their words. He wishes, with all his might, that Drift were here.

It’s inside him now, he realises. It’s _part of him._ Whatever power was held inside the Matrix, it fled its old physical form and took on a new one – inside _him._ He’s _never going to get it out._

The presence hums in the back of his mind, pleased.

Rodimus shudders in horror.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear I don't use this interpretation of the Matrix all the time. It's just such an interesting take to explore... Also IDW Rodimus is 100% a chosen Prime and I don't take criticism for clinging to that.
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	16. Forced To Beg | G1 | Galvatron + Unicron + Rodimus Prime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: background war, literal Evil Robot God, Lovecraftian horror, psychological torture, reference to Robot Satan intentionally driving people into insanity for sadistic/exploitive purposes (which is very much not intended to be any sort of commentary or representation of IRL people who have psychosis), possession, nightmares that can literally kill you.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 16 : A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day**

**Forced To Beg | Hallucinations | Shoot The Hostage**

–

**G1 Galvatron + Unicron + Rodimus Prime**

–

Unicron is dead, here, in this universe, but such a multi-versal entity is not so easily destroyed in its entirety. And while he can no longer enter here, his doorway in excised from existence by the light of Primus shining in the hands of this world’s Hot Rod as he was changed into Rodimus Prime, sometimes… echoes linger.

There are none who know this better than Galvatron.

Not all incarnations of Galvatron are born of Unicron. Only a small minority are, in an act of multiverse wide mercy, though _whose_ mercy one could not say, and those who are not exist in oblivious bliss to the true horrors suffered by the minority that are.

There’s something – _wrong –_ with those twisted and reformatted by the Unmaker, on a level that naught else can touch. _Creation_ is antithesis to Unicron, so it makes sombre sense that those who could be considered his progeny are somewhat – skewed. Not _right,_ somehow, from the base-coding outwards.

Unicron is the darkness, the negative polarity, the absence in contrast to the presence, the yawning hunger of, not _death,_ but of _unlife._

(A shadow is but the absence of light, but to die means you existed. To _unlive_ means you never did.)

And in those shadows, sometimes, if one listens closely, one can _hear things._ It takes a truly unstable mind, one touched by that embodiment of unlife, to tap in to this particular frequency – Unicron slides in through the cracks in your foundation, through every place where your reality blurs the line with his _unreality –_ but once you’ve noticed it, it’s near impossible to ignore. It’s why the Unmaker revels in driving his victims into darkness-tinged insanity; he can _use_ them that way.

Galvatron is made of Unicron. His mind was always tuned to the right frequency.

–

Galvatron walks in darkness.

He’s dreaming, he knows, but just because something is taking place inside your head… it doesn’t mean it isn’t _real._ And when it comes to the Unmaker, and to the paths he laid riddled like arteries throughout the multiversal cosmos, it’s more than easy to get a little… turned around.

(There’s a reason they call it _losing your mind.)_

So Galvatron walks, deep in the darkness and only getting deeper. There is no visible change – there is no light here at all – but the darkness pulsates like a living thing, only it was never alive, so maybe it flexes simply with the possibilities of a blank page, never to be brought into being because once creation takes place the thing created moves out of this realm of existence entirely, mercifully not remembering its pre-creation state.

Galvatron goes on, silent, for no sound can be heard here, for sound requires sound waves, requires atoms to vibrate, and no such thing exists here in this absolute vacuum. _(No one can hear your screams.)_ Perhaps he is descending, perhaps he is ascending, perhaps he is simply walking straight forward. No one, not even Galvatron, can tell. Time and space don’t exist here in the same way they do in the world beyond; both are inverted, both are… slippery, more concept than reality.

Finally, the darkness loosens, slightly, doesn’t press quite so close, nearly, but not quite, physical in its non-existent weight. It opens out, for lack of better words – indeed, describing these places, these _non-places,_ in clumsy, mortal-created words is an exercise in futility at best – into a room. There are no walls, ceiling or floor. No doors. Nothing but blank darkness.

But, make no mistake, this is a room. Or, perhaps, judging by the glinting chains coiling across the floor, it is a _cell._

Galvatron’s red optics – the only light here, looming out of the darkness, though he can see perfectly as though it were broad daylight, though he still doesn’t know if it would be any different to any mech not Unmaker-made – follow the trailing chains. Their metal is rusted and corroded, but he knows they have not been weakened in any way. Things are slowly unmade here. People are no different – the mind goes first, then the frame, and before they know it, Unicron has taken another spark.

The chains lead him to huddled figure, curled on their side on the floor. Despite the way this place leaches the life and colour out of everything, Galvatron can still recognise the faded paint of the mech. He would be able to pick this one out from _orbit._

_Rodimus Prime._

Galvatron comes up beside him, kneels, and finally the hush over his vocaliser breaks and he says, “Prime?”

Rodimus Prime doesn’t answer, shivering, curling in tighter. Now that he’s closer, Galvatron can see how battered his counterpart is, how he’s going ever-so-slightly grey at the edges. It’s a spark-stopping sight, and Galvatron snarls, reaches forward, lays a hand on Rodimus Prime’s cool – too cool – shoulder pauldron and shakes it. “Prime!”

Rodimus Prime spits out wordless static, and his blue optics flicker on, and then continue to flicker, distant stars winking in and out in the dark. _“Galvatron…?”_ he whispers, and while his frame looks like himself, his EM field feels like himself, and even his voice sounds like himself, there’s an unmistakeable undertone that is very much _not-himself._ The void is speaking through him. _“Galvatron… why are… you here?”_

Galvatron shakes him again. “Where else would I be?” he replies, and it’s more than a little bitter. “The Unmaker does not let go so easily, Prime. Did your _Matrix_ not warn you?”

“ _ **I never let go,”**_ says Rodimus Prime.

Galvatron jerks back as Rodimus Prime’s Matrix-blue optics flicker again, turning a poisonous green, his handsome face twisting into something almost unrecognisable. An inky black viscous liquid begins to drip from his Unicron-green optics, down his cheekplates, oozing out of his mouth and staining his suddenly-sharp denta as he continues to speak. _**“Galvatron…my** **Herald** **…”**_

“Unicron,” Galvatron snarls, forcing down the _my master_ that rises unbidden and unwanted on his glossa. Unicron is _not his master._ He has no master.

Rodimus Prime’s frame uncoils – that’s the only word for it, it does not move naturally, too slick, too flexible – and he rises to his pedes, Galvatron backing away, raising his cannon. _**“Do you think to hurt me?”**_ He smiles mockingly. _**“With such a weapon? I made it. I made you.”**_

The room twists around them, seams breaking open in the darkness, revealing the swirling chaos beyond. It’s not a sight that can be described. Galvatron can barely think to visualise it when awake; it defies conscious thought, sears his helm with such pain it becomes near impossible to function if his thoughts stray towards it. Galvatron was still made from a Cybertronian frame, no matter what power touched and turned him, and some things are not meant for the perception of the mortal mind.

“Let him go,” Galvatron says, still aiming at the mech – Rodimus Prime, _his nemesis! –_ that his _old master_ is using, still hesitant to fire, in a way he isn't in the waking world. His Prime can take it in the waking world. In this one? Where his dreaming mind has been gripped, torn away, held hostage by the Chaos Bringer? The stakes are too high. Attacking the mind directly has far direr consequences than roughing up a frame reformatted to handle him.

Unicron grins with Rodimus Prime’s face, too wide, too sharp, unnatural. _**“Make me.”**_

He disappears into a swirl of nothingness, and Galvatron curses.

–

Galvatron stalks through the darkness with a purpose he had not had before.

He’s wandered here in his dreams all his life, and he knows how this unreality works. _Wanting something_ means that it only gets farther away. _Not wanting something_ attracts it closer. The paths are many, varied, and ever-shifting, and there are – things – that you may meet. Everything here is not real, but the level of not-real is changeable. Sometimes… they’re real enough to do harm, if one isn’t careful.

So Galvatron focuses on how much he _doesn’t want_ Unicron to find him, pulling on old and buried fears, the memories of writhing in Unicron’s iron grip, his thoughts not truly his own, a _slave._ These are not memories he touches often – at all, actually – but for his Prime? He would relive them a thousand times, with only the assurance of that blazing fiery light at the end to comfort him.

Creatures unborn – never to be – throw themselves at him as the pathways twist and turn, get wide and then narrow, and Galvatron looks them in whatever passes for their optics as he marches on, unrelenting. Cyclonus’ shattered face begs with him, and Scourge’s hands are dismembered and walking on their pink talons towards him, but Galvatron powers through, despite the way the sights tug at his spark, urging him to stop, slow down, come _here…_

_They’re not real,_ Galvatron sternly commands of himself, _they’re hallucinations, pieces of dreams, things that will never be. **Ignore them.**_

It’s easier said than done, but Galvatron is no stranger to the illusory horrors – and the not-so-illusory ones – that Unicron likes to throw when he’s feeling like _punishment,_ when he’s feeling like he wants to _laugh_ at another’s anguish.

(One day, maybe, Galvatron will have spent long enough in his Prime’s light that all darkness can no longer find anchor in him, the connections burnt away. He wants it. He wants it so badly he could throw himself at his Prime’s pedes and _beg_ if he hadn’t already sworn to never bow before another. Not even Rodimus Prime.)

Finally, he emerges into another room, empty except for the raised throne on a dais and the frame slumped in it, even the build of a Prime made small by the size of the throne. There are chains made of shadows binding Rodimus Prime there, and they shift and sway, flexing like the breaths they’ll never breathe.

Galvatron moves closer, looking for the trap. His steps don’t echo, though it feels like they should. The dais rises, smooth black stone of some kind, non-reflective, mouths of the void that the eye skitters away from, and Galvatron ascends the steps cut so sharply into it that trailing a finger on an edge might actually shear the metal and spill energon.

He’s right in front of his Prime when Unicron raises his head and speaks, staring at Galvatron amusedly. _**“What would you do to have your Prime back?”**_ he asks.

Galvatron grits his denta. “What would you have me do, _Unicron?”_

“ ** _Beg,”_** Unicron answers. **_“Beg for his life, and I may spare it.”_**

Galvatron swallows his not-inconsiderable pride. He tries to imagine a world in which he _begs_ for anything. Then he tries to imagine a world with no Rodimus Prime in it. Both are terrible, but one is infinitely worse. “Please, let him go,” he forces out, unable to make his tone pleading, exactly, but trying for a slightly less commanding voice. It’s not perfect.

“ _ **Beg again,”**_ Unicron orders. _**“Beg your master.”**_

“Please, master…” Galvatron grits out. “Let him go.”

The shadowy chains wrapped around his Prime loosen. _**“Good pet,”**_ Unicron laughs before the stolen vocaliser glitches with static and Rodimus Prime’s frame slumps forward, green fading from his optics.

Galvatron catches him, holds him up. “Prime!”

“Ga-galva-tron?” his Prime slurs out. “Wh-here?”

But there’s no time to answer him, for Unicron’s laughter echoes around them, the voice of the master of this realm having no trouble carrying through it. His Prime flinches and Galvatron drags him up, pulling him towards the shrinking exit. He should have known that Unicron would not let them go freely!

Thankfully, his Prime is no idiot, and quickly starts pulling his own weight, despite his continuing confusion. Galvatron leads them out into the shifting paths, gripping his Prime close, because by the way he’s squinting, Galvatron is the only one who can actually see the trails that lead through the darkness.

Galvatron pushes his Prime forward, and snaps in his audio, “You need to wake up!”

“What?”

“Wake up, Prime! You need to wake up, or your mind will be forever lost here!” They both will be, if Unicron has anything to say about it.

“I – I don’t know how!” his Prime says.

That’s fair enough; this place is designed to ensnare. Galavtron walks it and escapes it by virtue of his Unmaker-made origins, not any learnable skill. In fact, the only sure-fire way to wake up is to shock the mind back into the body, which is most easily achieved with…

With _pain._

Galvatron snarls to himself. “Don’t hold _this one_ against me,” he says. He doesn’t give his Prime the chance to wonder before he turns and fires a low-power plasma blast from his cannon, clipping his Prime’s sensitive spoiler.

His Prime howls with pain, but his form disintegrates into light, dispersing and escaping.

Unicron makes a shriek of anger as Galvatron takes one of his own fingers into his grip, twisting and pulling until the digit’s small strut breaks with a flash of pain. The darkness washes away around him, and in moments he’s awake on his berth, still laughing at Unicron’s thwarted rage.

Far away, in Autobot City, Rodimus Prime lurches upwards from his berth, the Matrix burning in his chest and glowing bright in the room. His spoiler wing _aches._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know it's an OTP when you set out to write a Galvatron + Unicron Lovecraftian horror whump fic and Rodimus shoulders his way in unplanned to put in his two cents.
> 
> To make it clear how Unicron's unreality works... on the shallower levels, you're basically astral-projecting into them, your mind still able to be shocked back into your body by something sudden and sharp, like pain. Hence why that worked for Rodimus and Galvatron. Deeper in, where Unicron lures or chases you, you are more ensnared, and your mind not so able to shake free. Pain there would not be your ally, it would only hurt. 
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	17. Wrongfully Accused | G1 | Hot Rod

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: background war, implied/referenced abuse, technical kidnapping, implied/referenced robot-racism, implied/referenced cultural erasure, leaping to assumptions, a firefight with laser guns, implied/referenced imprisonment.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No 17 : I Did Not See That Coming**

**~~Blackmail~~ | Dirty Secret | Wrongfully Accused **

–

**G1 Hot Rod**

–

By the time they re-establish communications with the Prime and his team, by the time they re-connect with other Autobot cells throughout Cybertron, by the time they reach Earth… it honestly wasn’t a thing that any of them thought about.

They didn’t keep the secret intentionally – it simply never occurred to any of them that they _were_ keeping the information secret; even Ultra Magnus, a long time confidant of Optimus Prime and member of Autobot High Command, doesn’t think to say, _Oh, by the way, one of my mechs was built a Decepticon, hope that doesn’t bother you!_

Okay, so Hot Rod’s integrated weapons systems get a couple of raised optic-ridges, but his bright colours, racer alt form, blue optics, and big red Autobot symbol outshine them quickly. The way that both Kup and Ultra Magnus – two old and well respected Autobots – don’t hesitate to call him a member of their team soothes any wondering thoughts before they’ve had a chance to really come to anyone’s attention.

Kup even calls Hot Rod a _good lad, bit reckless, but his spark’s in the right place._ That old, rusty, and ever-suspicious mech would never do that if he didn’t mean it. Even Ironhide doesn’t do more than look at Hot Rod’s triple barrel forearm laser blasters, tilt his head, and ask if he _really knows how to use ‘em?_

(Hot Rod shows him that he does at the _Ark’s_ shooting range, proving his proficiency in such a way that even the Autobots’ Chief Weapons Specialist can’t argue with.

“You’re a punk,” Ironhide says, good-naturedly, reaching out to cuff the back of Hot Rod’s helm affectionately. “I like it. Betcha keep Kup an’ Magnus on their toes.”

“On their toes?” Hot Rod asks, confused.

“Earth term, don’ worry ‘bout it,” Ironhide says. “You’ll pick up the local lingo soon enough. They got some real good ones.”)

And so it is that a situation primed for future drastic misunderstandings is set up without anyone even recognising it. Of course, Hot Rod’s luck being what it is – blessed by Unicron, it feels like, sometimes – it was bound to be revealed in the worst possible way at the worst possible time.

Honestly, sometimes it feels like either Primus, Unicron, or _both_ are out to make Hot Rod’s life _difficult._

–

The Decepticons are raiding one of Earth’s power plants. According to the Earth Autobots, this is nothing unusual, and the ‘Cons have been consistently following such a pattern for over twenty Earth years by now.

Hot Rod supposes it makes sense; the geothermal energy of the volcano the _Ark_ is mostly buried in supplies the Autobots with a source for their energon converters, but the Decepticons are trapped beneath the ocean, and Cybertronian technology has never expanded into hydro-power – Cybertron is rather lacking in large bodies of any type of liquid. Even if it’s possible – and it is, because the humans have done it – the ‘Cons don’t have the mechanical resources to get such a station up and running and secured, not before it got sabotaged by the Earth Autobots. Hence, the continued raiding.

(Hot Rod wonders why the Prime doesn’t just let the ‘Cons build their station. That way, less humans would be placed into danger, and the Autobots would know exactly where to target to stifle Decepticon energon production, control the flow so that the ‘Cons don’t have the excess to fuel huge weapons or operations, but are not desperate enough to raid.

He asks Kup this. The older Autobot looks at him, optics unreadable, before quietly pulling him somewhere more private and saying that ‘Bots don’t think like that. Tactical and strategic processor units are not part of Autobot builds. Even the one belonging to their second-in-command, Prowl, is not compatible with his Autobot coding, and was added at a later time. That’s why it causes him pain and crashes.

“Oh,” Hot Rod says. It’s just – so _obvious_ to him. Sometimes he forgets how differently his processor is wired in comparison to the rest of his team.

“Don’t worry about it, lad,” Kup says, placing a hand on Hot Rod’s shoulder pauldron. “Not your fault.”)

Anyway, Hot Rod is on the field, crouched behind a rocky outcropping and firing at the ‘Cons. Pitched battles like these are still new to him – back on Cybertron, under the iron fist of Shockwave, the Autobots were more a group of semi-connected guerrilla resistance cells than an army – but there’s a huge part of him that absolutely _loves it._ It’s slightly disturbing, actually, just _how much_ Hot Rod’s base-coding adores the battlefield. He's more uneasy at how much he doesn’t feel uneasy than anything else.

Kup had said that ‘Cons loved to fight, and – yeah. Hot Rod _feels it._ He chides himself – he is an _Autobot_ in every way that matters – but. Apparently his Decepticon origins won’t be forgotten so easily.

Soon enough, he ends up in a firefight with a ‘Con using a large rock about twenty metres away as cover, exchanging laser blasts with what even Hot Rod recognises as maybe a bit too much enthusiasm. Then, unexpectedly, the ‘Con just – stops.

“Hey,” the ‘Con calls out, “are those integrated lasers?”

“What’s it to you?” Hot Rod retorts, taking another shot with his very Decepticon-like triple barrel forearm blasters. He steadfastly ignores the fact that he knows full well what the ‘Con is thinking: what sort of _Autobot_ has integrated weapons systems?

“Wait,” the ‘Con says, “you that new-spark that got taken from Darkmount a couple thousand years ago?”

Hot Rod very determinedly doesn’t answer, which, he knows, is about as good as confirming. He transforms his left hand into his compacted missile launcher and begins to try and get the ‘Con farther away by destroying his closer cover. The ‘Con curses, and retreats, but not before calling out behind him, “Shockwave got Turmoil interred in the Detention Centre for what he did to you. You don’t hafta stay with the _‘Bots,_ kid. You’re not a ‘Bot.”

“I am,” Hot Rod mutters under his breath, not loud enough to be heard by the ‘Con. He refuses to think of the memories that the name _Turmoil_ brings up.

The battle ends, the Decepticons retreating with a medium-sized amount of energon. Hot Rod feels shaken in a way that has nothing to do with gunfire.

–

Four Earth days later, Hot Rod gets called up to the command room without warning.

He’s nervous – he has no idea what this is about – and when he meets Ultra Magnus outside the door, as clueless as he is, the feeling only gets worse.

The door slides open. Ultra Magnus, being of higher rank, goes in first, and Hot Rod follows behind. The Autobot High Command team – Optimus Prime, Prowl, Jazz, Ironhide, Ratchet – are all here, though Red Alert is not. The unit commanders – Silverbolt, Hot Spot, Grimlock – are also missing, but. It’s a lot of rank to be faced with. Hot Rod tries not to visibly waver uncertainly.

“Magnus, my friend,” begins Optimus Prime, “please step away from Hot Rod.”

“Prime?” Ultra Magnus asks, but does so, because millions of years have him trusting in the Prime. Instantly, the door behind them locks, and Ironhide is levelling a cannon across the table, pointed straight at Hot Rod’s chest, whose optics go wide. Jazz’s mouth has fallen into a grim line, a blaster of his own in his hand, and Prowl looks beyond stern. Optimus Prime gazes across the room with sorrowful but determined optics. Ratchet is silent, assessing.

“Prime, what is this?” Ultra Magnus demands, and he steps back towards Hot Rod, angling himself partially in front of his mech.

“Step away from th’ ‘Con, Magnus,” Ironhide growls. “You’ve been tricked.”

“’Con?” Ultra Magnus asks. “Roddy is _not_ a ‘Con, Ironhide. That was _cruel.”_

A part of Hot Rod is truly touched that Ultra Magnus just called him _Roddy_ in front of all his peers, like such a nickname wasn’t something he usually kept private. The lines between officers and soldiers had – blurred, in those hard years, in such small teams all trying to eke out, not victory, but _survival._ Ultra Magnus, Kup, Arcee, Springer, Blurr and Hot Rod did not a large cell make, and perhaps High Command might have something to say at how affectionate – if in his own, stilted way – Ultra Magnus is with his personal team, but Hot Rod doesn’t care to hear it.

The larger part of him has optics focused on Ironhide’s cannon, and is trying to restrain the urge to raise his arms. His lasers are already primed and active – Hot Rod can’t stop those natural combat programs any more than he can stop a hurricane from forming – but he’s not going to give Ironhide any reason to shoot first and ask questions later. The angry, betrayed look on his face is bad enough, and emotions like that aren’t great at facilitating taking a moment to listen.

“He is,” Optimus Prime says, apologetically. “Blaster and Jazz managed to catch and decode a Decepticon communication with Cybertron. Hot Rod was named. He is to be interred in the brig until such a time that he can be traded for some concession we need.” The Prime sighs, and he really does sound sorrowful. “I’m sorry, my friend. Your mech is an infiltrator.”

Ultra Magnus opens his mouth, wheezes, closes it. “Primus,” he says, and then rubs a hand down in face in a move so out-of-character, the rest of the ‘Bots in the room stare. Except Hot Rod, who is fighting the urge to lay a comforting hand on Ultra Magnus’ back. It won’t be perceived well by the others in the room right now. “Call Kup. He’s gonna want to be here for this. And by our god below, Ironhide, _put your cannon down._ Hot Rod is _one of us.”_

Ironhide does so, but the room remains tense until Kup arrives. Ultra Magnus has since pulled Hot Rod to his side, despite the way the others in the room shift, and Hot Rod leans in, grateful for the weight of his commander’s presence.

“What’s going on?” Kup asks gruffly, once he’s inside.

“They think Hot Rod’s a ‘Con infiltrator,” Ultra Magnus says, and his hand on Hot Rod’s tightens a little. He pays no mind to the warm triple barrels he can surely feel, still active and charged.

Kup’s face falls into a scowl. “Prime,” he says, and it’s a tone that the entire room stills at. “Look. I respect you an’ your team a hell of a lot. But Roddy’s ‘Con origins are in his fraggin’ _medical files._ It weren’t a secret. He’s no infiltrator; Arcee’s a better liar than th’ kid. So what gives?”

The Autobot High Command team blink, and the tone of the room shifts uncertainly. “You… knew?” Prime asks, wrong-footed.

“O’course I knew,” Kup grumbles. “I’m th’ one who pulled ‘im outta there. Kid was brand new an’ Turmoil – you mechs remember _Turmoil,_ right? He was havin’ heaps o’ fun knockin’ ‘round this young thing, an’ I – heh. I took offence. Cornered ‘im – kid thought I was gonna kill ‘im – an’ gave him the option. Kid took it. He’s an Autobot in every way that matters. So stop your slag right now. Roddy’s no ‘Con.”

“I see,” Optimus Prime says, and it’s not Hot Rod’s imagination that he sounds relieved, is it? The Prime raises a hand to press over his chest, absently. Then his gaze focuses on Hot Rod. “I’m sorry, Hot Rod,” Optimus Prime rumbles. “There seems to have been a grave misunderstanding.”

“Turmoil?” Jazz asks, blaster gone, tucked away so fast even Hot Rod’s not sure which subspace pocket he stashed it in (he has no doubt that the head of Autobot Spec. Ops has multiple subspace pockets). “I remember that slagger. What a piece o’ work. Roddy here was lucky to escape; that mech held no respect for no one, not even his fellow ‘Cons.”

“Jazz,” Optimus Prime says, “there is no need to bring up memory files I’m sure Hot Rod would rather not retrieve. Get a full report from Magnus and Kup; I’ve no doubt they’ve been thorough enough already.”

“Sure thing, Prime,” Jazz says, even as he tips his head at Hot Rod.

Optimus Prime rises, steps around the table, comes up to Hot Rod. He’s _so big,_ as big as Ultra Magnus, and Hot Rod stares up into his naturally blue optics – his own are only blue ‘cause Kup changed out the red lenses – and refuses to waver again. He _is_ a ‘Bot. He _is._

“Kup’s told me a lot about you,” Prime says. “I feared for him when I thought he had made such a mistake, but I see now that it was I who was mistaken. I concur with him; you have great potential, Hot Rod.” He hesitates for a moment before he adds on, thoughtfully, “The Matrix… it _likes_ you.”

“Pfft!” Ironhide snorts. “The Matrix likes a ‘Con build? Next thing you’ll say is we’ll have a ‘Con Prime – who ever heard o’ such a thing? Ridiculous!” Then he is silenced by – something – Ratchet, who is sitting next to him, does under the table. Hot Rod can’t see exactly what, but the look on the medic’s face as Ironhide turns to complain is enough to abruptly shut the Weapons Specialist up.

“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure, Ironhide,” Optimus Prime murmurs quietly, optics never leaving Hot Rod’s. “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, boy, this one is a doozy. For those who don't know; in G1, the Autobots and Decepticons aren't two factions as much as they are two sub-races, each with their own culture, traditions, etc. So... there's a lot of cultural erasure undertones going on here. 
> 
> The 'Bots think they _saved_ Hot Rod, that they "rescued" him, and while on a narrow level they're technically right (Turmoil was one abusive slagger), on a wider level, they essentially kidnapped and raised a young member of another culture within their own, with no respect for teaching him about his origins in any sort of non-racist way. (And they don't even strictly realise their own racism). Like I said, a doozy.
> 
> (Red Alert isn't there because putting someone with clinical paranoia into a situation like that was considered to be Not A Good Idea. Totally not because the author forgot about him and had to edit in a line noting that he was missing later.)
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	18. Panic Attacks | IDW | Minimus Ambus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: panic attack, background civil war aftermath, implied/referenced attempted genocide, implied PTSD, disassociation, vaguely suicidal thoughts (more _I-don't-want-to-live_ than _I-want-to-die_ , but I have to warn for them), self-worth issues.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 18 : Panic! At The Disco**

**Panic Attacks | ~~Phobias~~ | Paranoia**

–

**IDW Minimus Ambus**

–

The secret of Ultra Magnus has been kept for so long that, now that it’s out, now that mecha look at the Magnus Armour and know that it is _armour,_ that there’s a smaller mech inside, Minimus is more than a bit uneasy.

At first, it is easy to explain away. The breaking of such a sensitive piece of intel, even if the war is ostensibly _over,_ even without taking into account the – horrific events surrounding the reveal… surely a bit of discomfort, a bit of uneasy paranoia, is not outside the realm of logical possibility? Minimus doesn’t feel like it is.

When he wanders through the ship these days, going about his duty as second-in-command – which he still has, somehow, even though he _betrayed_ his captain to Tyrest, and – no matter his intentions, no matter Rodimus’ actions, whether or not he was right to fulfil his duty, he still turned his back on – on someone he might have called a _friend_ were he the type to use such vague terms – he wonders how much _respect_ he still commands from the crew. Surely not as much as before.

He knows they saw him, the real him, stripped down to his _irreducible_ self. And while Rung has some things to say about _not being able to be stripped down to what you are,_ Minimus still feels exposed, no matter how many layers of armour he hides himself in.

Tiny little _Minimus._ It’s right there in the _name._ Always the shadow trailing after some brighter, better mech, always second place or lower.

First it was Dominus, his brother, and – he loved Dominus, don’t get him wrong. Loved him with everything he had. But Dominus outshone him without trying to, and by the time Rewind came around, Minimus continuously got bumped lower and lower on Dominus’ list of priorities.

He tries – and mostly succeeds, except in those quiet night hours when reminiscing creeps upon him with a dark and sorrowful shadow – to not begrudge Dominus for it. _Of course_ his brother’s Conjunx was a higher priority than the spark brother who was very much a grown mech with his own life and who could take care of himself. In fact, Minimus would have disliked it if Dominus had been constantly up in his business. So he has nothing to complain about, really.

After Dominus, it was a slew of commanding officers, happy enough to lean on methodical, reliable Minimus. After all of them, it was Tyrest, who gave Minimus a higher purpose, a greater role to play. All he’d had to do was leave _Minimus_ behind him forever. Ultra Magnus was unkillable – Minimus knew, right from the start, that he would live and die in that suit of armour, and never be mourned for who he was.

It was a position he had taken with something like pride, something like relief. Minimus had killed Minimus, and Ultra Magnus had risen in his place, bigger and better and more important than small little Minimus could have ever been. He’d thought that was the end of Minimus.

Then he’d followed Rodimus. _Rodimus,_ who outshines all the rest. So bright is his light, and Minimus just – trailed after, is _still_ trailing after, allured completely. Verity had once explained to him a human idiom – _like a moth drawn to a flame –_ and Minimus can see it. Rodimus is so bright he burns, and Minimus _wants to burn._

Only now Rodimus knows the truth; knows that his big and powerful second is not big and powerful at all, is actually nothing but a sham, and it makes something like _shame_ curdle inside Minimus, though he knows he shouldn’t be ashamed of having fulfilled his duty. The duty he thought he would die fulfilling, unrecognised.

Minimus has no idea how to handle existing by himself, existing as a separate entity from The Duly Appointed Enforcer of the Tyrest Accord, Ultra Magnus.

He’s returned to life, and he’s discovered that he doesn’t think he wants it.

–

Minimus stands in the middle of his hab suite. Only, no, it’s not _his,_ it’s _Ultra Magnus’,_ and everything in and around reflects that.

All the furniture is too big; the berth, the table, the chair, the desk, the shelves, _everything._ Ultra Magnus, in life, was a large mech, in the size class only second to Titans. Minimus feels like he’s standing in Ultra Magnus’ cast shadow, too small to see the light beyond.

He tries to shake the thought from his mind. The Magnus Armour is sitting off to the side, in one of the chairs, chest open for repairs after the _Lost Light’s_ latest entanglement with a group of sentient plants on the last planet they’d visited, who’d taken immense offence to Rodimus’ fiery existence. They are well away from that planet now, but Minimus has just spent the last two hours prying thick dead thorny vines out of the Magnus Armour’s seams and joints, and he’s more than ready to call it a night.

He gets up onto the berth with – difficulty. It’s more a clamber than anything, and he has to – to his own mortification – actually abandon the attempt to go retrieve one of the empty energon cubes from beside his small personal dispenser (a commodity only for the ship’s officers) to lay upside-down on the ground and stand on as a step up to his berth. It’s _humiliating._

When he tries to fall into recharge, he can’t do it. His combat systems keep cycling up out of his control, insisting that he’s in the open, that he’s exposed, that somewhere in the shadows there’s a ‘Con sniper with their sights set straight on him. He lies there, adrift in his own berth, the expanse too large to really feel like a berth, the high-density foam now of a tier too unyielding for the reduced weight of his frame, the berth-side table a looming silhouette he’s looking _up_ at, its contents beyond reach.

Minimus twists and turns, and within an hour his own uneasiness and paranoia has him sliding down off the berth, turning up the lights in the room, and returning to the Magnus Armour’s repairs. _It’s what I should be doing, anyway,_ he tells himself firmly, and if he feels a pressing urge to fix it up as fast as possible so that he can climb back in and curl up inside, _safe_ behind the heavy-duty battle-grade armour plating, then it’s not a feeling he lets form into actual thought.

–

In the aftermath of the captaincy vote, Rodimus retreats into his quarters.

Ultra Magnus hesitates, lingers uncertainly around the edges of his captain’s absence; in his office and checking repeatedly his inbox and his comm, waiting for – something, patrolling the surrounding corridors, taking care not to pause outside the door to the locked shut hab suite, but passing it perhaps more times than strictly necessary.

He waits. Rodimus doesn’t appear.

The day drags on, and, eventually, Ultra Magnus is forced to return to his own hab suite, in preparation for the next day’s duty cycle. The Magnus Armour is still – sticky is the word that comes to mind, though Minimus hates its ambiguity. Liable for lag in its processing and grinding in its gears. He’s clearly missed some foliage somewhere.

Primus, he’s tired. He hasn’t recharged well in – too many days, really, and if he doesn’t manage it soon, Ratchet will be venting down the back of his neck cables, berating him for something that _Minimus can’t control._

(Minimus _hates_ not having control. There is nothing about its loss that is appealing, whether it be through intoxication, interface, or just general inability to master a situation.

There is nothing about this situation that is controllable. Mecha’s thoughts are their own, and no matter what he tries, Minimus can’t _make them_ respect him the way that Ultra Magnus commanded respect. Their gazes – linger, more, these past few weeks. Their faces and optics are unreadable.

Minimus has never been good at navigating social interactions, but Ultra Magnus had never had to, not in the same way. Mecha bent to The Duly Appointed Enforcer of the Tyrest Accord, went along with him, and Minimus had no shortage of scripted lines to say.

Now, he’s lost in a sea he thought he would never get wet in again, battered by currents that would never have moved Ultra Magnus.)

So he gets into his hab suite, locks the door behind, and more stumbles over to the chair he’s going to sit the Magnus Armour down in than walks there, but there’s no one around to see that, no one around to judge the slightest faltering but himself. And he does. He judges harshly, berating his stumble, berating his weak acknowledgement of physical and mental exhaustion. Ultra Magnus is an unassailable figure; _nothing_ should visibly touch him.

But Minimus Ambus is not _really_ Ultra Magnus, is he? Such weakness, such fallibility, is only expected, really. He’s failed to meet the mark. Again.

Minimus sits the Magnus Armour down in the chair, initiates the program that will revert his senses back to his own frame, disengaging the cords and connections, onlining his optics into the dark interior, lit by some dim bio-lights and buttons, feeling the cables wind back in, clicking his own panels shut. The chest splits open like a door, and Minimus has long since perfected gracefully emerging, but tonight he clambers out shaking, trembling, ending up embarrassingly sprawled onto the floor in front of the chair and the Armour, shivering uncontrollably.

_What’s wrong with me?_ Minimus wonders in a daze, panic constricting his intake. _Have I been poisoned?_

The thought is illogical; even if Minimus were to have consumed contaminated energon, it would be the Magnus Armour’s tanks to have received them, not his own, for the smaller frame inside is hooked into the energy that the internal reactor produces, not the fuel itself. This is a design feature that has saved the lives of more than one Ultra Magnus.

Minimus trembles in place on the floor. He feels paradoxically cold and yet hot at the same time. His fans are roaring, though his HUD doesn’t report his internal temperature to be of a high enough degree to justify the high setting. They roar on anyway, rattling his already shivering frame, outside, once again, of his control.

He trembles in place. Should he – should he call Ratchet? His diagnostics are coming up all clear, but – but what is _wrong with him?_ Anxious fear swamps him like a wave, and Minimus is bowled over by it, armour plates rattling, fans whirring, pistons pressurising and depressurising with no input, making his limbs unreliable. His fuel pump is at too fast of a rate to be natural, and his spark is _aching_ in his chamber.

Minimus manages to rise to his elbows and knees, and, in a sudden flash of fear lashing like a whip, paranoia has him lurching clumsily for the shadows cast by the too large chair and the Magnus Armour sitting in it. He curls up by its pede, and if anyone were to poke their head inside the room, chances are that if he could manage to get his frame to be silent, he would go unnoticed.

Minimus clenches trembling fingers to the blue armour plating, rattling against it, the Magnus Armour immovable. His digits catch on the curves of the plating, on the tyre encased inside the pede, for the Magnus Armour’s alt mode, and he clings tight. The room is spinning, whirling away around him, so distant, it’s like he’s falling, and the floor beneath him and the Magnus Armour’s pede under his fingers are the only things in the world that are solid, are real.

He shakily presses his other hand to the front of his own chest, right over his aching spark chamber. His mouth is open slightly, short, inefficient gasps escaping his intake, though his vocaliser seems to have muted itself. Heat and cold continue to wreak havoc up and down his frame, despite repeated checks to his HUD informing him that while there are some abnormalities – increased fuel pump cycles, malfunctioning pistons, some others – his temperature is still in normal range.

_I don’t like this,_ Minimus thinks, shuttering his optics as tight as they will go. _Make it stop. Please – please… Dominus… Rodimus… make it **stop.**_

There’s no one to answer him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so mean to Minimus and he really doesn't deserve it. Also, if you're picking up on neuro-divergent vibes... they're intentional. 
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	19. Grief | IDW | Drift (Alternate Lost Light)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: background civil war aftermath, implied/referenced canonical character death, grief, mourning, blaming yourself, loss of faith, mutilation of a corpse, on-screen violence, the D.J.D. who are their own warning, and the fact that the author set out to emotionally hurt people in this instalment.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 19 : Broken Hearts**

**Grief | Mourning Loved One | Survivor’s Guilt**

–

**IDW Drift _(Alternate Lost Light)_**

–

It still doesn’t feel _real._

Drift watches numbly as the small vessel containing Rodimus’ grey frame is ejected into space, given to the stars the way he said he wanted to be, floating forever amongst the bright fiery lights he’d been so enamoured of back in Nyon, gazing up through the light pollution, squinting to see them beyond the satellites and ships.

There are mecha around him, talking quietly, but the funeral is over, and people are dispersing, trailing off a bit lost, a bit directionless, unsure of what, exactly, to do now. Drift empathises, but doesn’t move, staring out of the viewing window until the pod is gone from sight and then longer besides.

The weight of his Spectralist cloak around him, the brush of heavy cloth across his plating… if he shutters his optics, imagines, then the static it produces could almost be an EM field. If he applies memory files, then it could be _Rodimus’_ EM field, standing close enough to merge with Drift’s, just seconds away from swinging an arm around Drift’s shoulders, pulling him in, and surely if Drift could but turn to look, there Rodimus would be, his bright smile splitting his face, mischievous optics dancing as he challenges Drift to a race through the lower decks, directly against the rules laid down by Ultra Magnus.

Desperately wanting this waking dream to be true, Drift turns his head to look. There’s no one there.

–

They’re on course and they’ve still got the map inside the half of the Matrix that was given to Rodimus. A part of Drift – a huge part – had wanted to leave that broken half inside Rodimus’ chest, had wanted to send him off with it. _Proof_ that he had been chosen, that he was a _Prime._ And what with Optimus Prime having given up the Matrix and changed his name back to Orion Pax – the _last Prime._ There would be no more.

_Primus has abandoned us,_ Drift thinks, one day, seated in meditation. It’s quiet, too quiet. Usually, before, Rodimus had been there, either trying to meditate as well – he’d never gotten exactly _good_ at it, but he’d always given it his best try, and the consistent putting forth of effort had meant a lot to Drift – or sitting off to one side, working on something of his own, just wanting to share Drift’s space.

It’s a frightening thought, and Drift immediately wants to shake it out of his head, refute it. He has more _faith_ than this, surely?

But already his processor is assembling its arguments; no more Matrix, no more Primes, no more hot spots. Over two hundred million dead. And, back when the D-Void and the Dead Universe had been forces threatening them, they had managed to sink anchor into Cybertron because _Cybertron was a dead planet._

If Primus is their species’ source of life – whether personal belief has him literally being Cybertron or not (there are, after all, multiple interpretations and schools of thought) – then merely the lack of new sparks should surely be enough evidence that Primus has, if not _died,_ then has _abandoned his creations?_

Drift sternly tries to counter argue, fingers clenching on his knees, his meditation now thoroughly interrupted. _I knew all that before,_ he thinks firmly. _The hot spots have been cold and dark since long before the war, and that never stopped me from having faith._

But even if Drift’s faith could survive the lack of hot spots, even if it could survive the breaking of the Matrix, even if it could survive the “death” of Optimus Prime…

Can it survive _Rodimus’_ death?

–

Drift sets a piece of Rodimus’ laser core on his altar.

It’s – heh, it’s a Dead End tradition, that. When friends go grey, you pry open their cold chest, break out a little piece of their laser core – the vital component that within it frames and protects the photonic crystal, wherein lies the spark, and together the two make what is colloquially known as the _spark chamber –_ and carry it around with you forever after. The enforcers in Rodion were not quite so lax that corpses didn’t get cleared off the streets, after all, but none of them ever got a proper funeral, instead being dumped in smelters or taken into pieces for spare parts.

So that’s what Drift does, slipping into the morgue, passing by the rest of the grey frames laid out on the tables, unerringly going up to Rodimus’. It’s late, the night cycle, and both Ratchet and First Aid are in recharge, if on call for any additional emergency. Drift is more than capable of avoiding notice.

He steps up beside Rodimus’ grey frame, half of his head just – gone – and lays a warm hand on Rodimus’ cold chest. He’s done this before. He knows just how to get a dead mech’s chest to open, how to reach inside with a small plasma cutter, how to brush against the dark surface of the most intimate part of a Cybertronian without flinching, how to break off a little piece and tuck it away.

Taking from the outer spark chamber – the laser core – is for friends and lovers of the dead. Taking from the inner spark chamber – the photonic crystal – is only for an Amica or Conjunx. Despite everything, Rodimus and Drift had never officiated anything, no matter what Drift had dreamt of, what he’d thought about, maybe even what Rodimus had thought about. The regrets of roads not taken threaten to freeze Drift right here, hands still inside Rodimus’ dead chest, but he swallows and pulls away, fingers clenched around a piece of laser core.

The entire time, his optics remain dry.

–

“We need to keep going,” Ultra Magnus is saying at the head of the meeting room. “We’ve got the map from the Matrix, we know where to start looking, we’re still on course. It’s – the captain would have wanted us to go on.”

_You’re the captain, now,_ Drift thinks dully, but doesn’t dispute. If Ultra Magnus would rather keep referring to Rodimus as the captain, then that’s up to him. It still feels that way, at least. They’re still trailing the path Rodimus laid for them to follow, as if he’d just gone on ahead, briefly out of sight, and if they all just pick up the pace a little, Rodimus will be there waving them on, asking what’s taking them so long, why are you guys so _slow?_

Still. Ultra Magnus’ words are not lies. Rodimus wanted this quest, wanted it _so badly,_ and if they can fulfil his dream, reach Cyberutopia and begin anew, the evils of their war washed away, then would that make Rodimus happy, up there in the Afterspark? Would it make him proud?

Drift suddenly becomes aware of people looking at him, waiting. He blinks, takes in the solemn faces assembled around the table, and a part of him wants to berate himself for slipping so far that he became oblivious to what was going on around him – such a thing got mecha _killed –_ but the heat of feeling annoyed anger can’t shift the cold weight of grief sitting inside his chest. He runs back over the last few minutes in his head, replaying the audio file.

“Yes,” he says, more hoarsely than he wanted to. “We keep on going. Rodi – he would have wanted us to.”

–

_It’s my fault._

This thought has been prodding at him since the very start, when the spark-eater had first been revealed, when Rodimus had _died_ saving them from it, saving their sparks and preserving them, so that in the future they would _have_ an afterlife, not just nothingness.

_(Spark-eaters_ _are_ _n’t supposed to be_ _ **real!**_ Drift has wanted to scream since the very start. How could Rodimus have survived the entirety of the war, only to fall at the teeth and claws of a mythological nightmare?

It’s _not fair.)_

And how could the blame not be Drift’s? He’d bought the ship, he’d not seen through the obfuscation of the previous owners, he’d placed Rodimus directly into harm’s way in trying to give him his dream.

(“We’ll go up there, you an’ me,” Rodimus grins, gesturing up at the expanse of the night sky. "Think about it: adventuring across the cosmos! Leave all this slag behind us.”

“We have responsibilities here,” Drift says back, restraining his smile at Rodimus’ enthusiasm.

“Pssh! Like you think I couldn’t do both at once?” Rodimus laughs. “Trust me, I’ll find a way that makes it so that questing through space is _exactly_ what High Command wants us to be doing. You doubt me?”

“Never,” Drift says.)

_Rodimus is dead,_ Drift bites his lip, turns over in his berth, curls on his side as though he’s up against another, the same way he used to curl into Gasket’s side back in the Dead End, the way he and Rodimus sometimes recharged, when on campaigns, their EM fields blurred at the edges, their engines rumbling as one. Rodimus had always been warm, and Drift had always been a heat-seeker, malnourishment as a new-spark leaving his internal temperature regulators unreliable. _And I’m the one who killed him._

–

Sometimes, he dreams of another life, another chance.

Rodimus is there, bright and beaming and alive. The setting is the _Lost Light_ and all its crew, flying through the universe, wildly off-course and stumbling into adventures at every turn, seeking the Knights of Cybertron under the guidance of the last Prime, his fire lighting the way. Rodimus would have loved it.

Drift dreams of a Drift who has never lost his Rodimus, who still gets to sit by his side and watch holo-films, still gets to meditate together, still gets to spar with him, still gets to teach Rodimus how to use a sword, gets to touch him and move his arms and legs to position him just right.

_I love you,_ this other Drift thinks in the dreams, foolishly keeping the words pinned under his glossa. _I’ll follow you anywhere._

_**Say it,**_ Drift begs his dream counterpart. _ **Say it to him! Don’t let him think he wouldn’t mean anything if he died tomorrow. You’ll regret it. You’ll regret it for the rest of your life.**_

But his counterpart does not, is instead content to let actions speak for him, and – Drift gets it, he does, but Rodimus responds – _responded –_ so well to words, and – the idea of him dying without having fully understood just _how much_ he meant to Drift is a notion that has kept Drift up at night for hours, wondering, knowing he’ll never know the answer.

Drift can’t decide whether he loves or hates the dreams – visions – fantasises – whatever they are. Either way, his face is always wet with tears whenever he wakes from one, Rodimus dissolving into nothingness at the chiming of his internal chronometer’s alarm, swept away by the waking world.

–

Drift has always known that death via the Decepticon Justice Division was always a not-insignificant chance. He only wishes they had stopped at him and Overlord, not taken the rest of the crew as well, but. If wishes came true, things would be a lot different.

Tarn’s masked face leers down at him, and – Drift is no weak fighter, but there’s something unnatural running through Tarn’s systems, running through _all_ the D.J.D.’s systems, inciting them to heights of reckless viciousness and powered-up violence previously unknown.

It reminds Drift of the high of syk, looking at it, maybe a bit of the serums both sides tried to create in order to produce a substance that would render their fighters super-soldiers, either temporarily or permanently. None had ever worked right, not without immense effects on the mind of the mech, and whatever it is that Tarn’s hooked his division up with, it clearly has the same uncontrollable side effects as the rest.

Only those effects don’t matter, because the boost it gives has left a small five mech strong team capable of slaughtering their way through a crew of nearly two-hundred, most of them ex-soldiers themselves. That’s frightening enough, but the sheer lack of _reason,_ of being able to turn himself and Overlord over and know that the D.J.D. would leave the rest alone to continue working their way down the List…

Tarn’s blows are ruinous, and Drift wants to tell Ratchet to run, but even he knows it would be a waste of breath. Ratchet would never run.

Tarn snaps Drift’s swords like organic twigs, tosses aside the Great Sword so that not even Wing can come to his aid, and grasps Drift around the middle, lifting him up, plunging his large fingers into Drift’s chest. The armour dents, bends, sheers open, and the light of Drift’s spark shines out.

As Tarn grins – Drift can see it in his feverish optics, no matter the mask on his face – and reaches inside to place his hand on Drift’s spark chamber and crush it, Drift thinks, _I’ll see you soon, Roddy._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you or a loved one has been emotionally hurt by this instalment, you may be entitled to compensation. 
> 
> Anyway, you ever think that since Drift had visions of the Alternate _Lost Light_ , that Alt!Drift might have had visions of our one? And that he spent his dreams with a living Rodimus only to wake and find that Rodimus was still dead in reality? It's just... don't mind me, I'll just go cry over there, out of your way... 
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	20. Lost | G1 | Hot Rod + Arcee

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: background civil war, implied/referenced possible future extinction, major character injury, injury by explosive device, mentioned cave-in/structural collapse, shrapnel injury, the sweeping expanse of essentially a post-apocalyptic planet.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 20 : Toto, I Have A Feeling We’re Not In Kansas Anymore**

**Lost | Field Medicine | ~~Medieval~~**

–

**G1 Hot Rod +** **Arcee**

–

“So,” Hot Rod says, half-teasing, half-annoyed, “which way was it back to Iacon?”

“Hush,” Arcee says. “We’re not that lost.”

_We are,_ Hot Rod thinks, but the line of Arcee’s lips and her tense shoulders make him keep the words inside his head. She’s already stressed enough; Hot Rod’s not cruel.

Cybertron is a ruin. This is self-evident, observable from orbit. Over eight million years of warfare mostly confined to it has wrecked Cybertron to a degree that Hot Rod is sure will never, _ever_ be recoverable from. Even if, at some strange nebulous point in the future, the dream of _peace_ comes into reality… there is simply far too much damage to fully rebuild. Not if they had another eight million years to do it. Not even if they had twice that.

Hot Rod has never known peace. He has never known Cybertron in its prime, its people unified and living as one. He has only ever known war.

(Arcee is old enough to remember a time before the war. So is Springer, Kup, Ultra Magnus, Blurr. Hot Rod is the only member of their cell that is war-forged, built from pieces and parts scavenged from the corpses littering the streets, sparked by Vector Sigma during a brief episode when one of the supercomputer’s Keys got uncovered, and fell into Autobot hands.

As with all the Keys to Vector Sigma, it has since been destroyed by the battle over it. Perhaps there’s something to be said for the way that this inevitably happens – there were dozens of Keys before the war, and with each one they now uncover, they think it the last. All the rest end up gone by the time the scramble for it is over, with only a handful of new-sparks, at most, having been brought forth to help swell the lagging ranks of either side.

Does Vector Sigma itself decry the fighting? Does it intentionally limit the source of sparks by ensuring its Keys get destroyed? Building Cybertronians without Vector Sigma _is_ possible, but it’s a time-consuming, resource-consuming, finicky operation, and the mecha created can be damaged so easily by ignorance in their creators. No one living has the know-how to build proper mecha, not anymore. It’s just one more thing that got lost.

Hot Rod never voices this thought. It’s not something that can be said out loud, even if you can see it in the optics of everyone as the years drag on, and more mecha die than are brought to life. They’re going extinct, and no one seems to want to do anything about it, not really. That would mean having to meet in the middle, would mean having to give up whatever high ground they believe their cause gives them.

No, Hot Rod doesn’t say it. But he thinks it.)

Arcee leads the way, sticking close to the walls of the derelict buildings lining the streets. They’re barely even streets anymore; more like tracks where the wreckage is not quite as heavy, where there’s still space to drive in alt mode around the fallen debris for some stretches.

They’re well away from Iacon at the moment, they’ve been travelling through the underlayers for days. Updating maps and uncovering potential resources is important in their starved and starving world; with no way to feed the reactors, energon is scavenged from whatever sources squirrelled away and forgotten about by mecha long dead, or else from corpses. Hot Rod isn’t nearly as bothered by the latter practice as the rest of the Autobots in his cell, but then again, he’s the only one who’s never had the option of doing it another way.

It’s still dangerous, of course. The Autobots hold Iacon, and – that’s it, really. A bit of the surrounding land as well, but their numbers and resources are just stretched far too thin to hold more territory. And though it may be the Autobot stronghold, Hot Rod and his cell barely spend much time there; Elita-1 and her team organise the Autobot efforts from there, often clashing with Shockwave and his Decepticons directly, while Ultra Magnus negotiates the wide-spread resistance cells on the ground – and _under_ the ground – constantly on the move, scouting and sabotaging and skirmishing as needs demand.

Thankfully, though the ‘Cons hold more territory, it’s due to the fact that they can _fly_ more than anything else, which makes establishing smaller bases and transferring resources far simpler. Shockwave commands from Darkmount, but the ‘Cons only have about the same raw numbers and resources as the ‘Bots. And even if the enemy can fly, most of Cybertron is stacked layers anyway, so the ground-based Autobots can escape the threat above quite simply. It’s why this stalemate has gone on so long; neither side has any particular advantage over the other that doesn’t get balanced out somehow.

Hot Rod follows Arcee carefully. Their maps of this part of Cybertron – and no one from the pre-war era would have ever guessed that these ruins were once the great city of Ibex, Cybertron’s capital space port – are outdated by over four thousand years. The ruins themselves lie in Cybertron’s Theta Quadrant, which is ever changing hands between the ‘Bots and the ‘Cons, due to the fact that it is skirting the edge of each of their held territories, but has been so heavily scavenged already, that almost nothing of note is left there to find. They are light skirmishes over it, but neither side much puts in the effort anymore.

So, plus side: they know _roughly_ where they are. Minus side: Cybertron’s extensive ruination and dereliction have left the built-up layers _incredibly_ unsafe; uneven, rusted, and liable to collapse. Ibex is no exception. Arcee and Hot Rod have already had to find their way out of one minor cave in which took them three layers down and has gotten them fully turned around, and neither are eager to end up in another. They were too lucky the first time to get away with nothing more than scrapes and dents.

“Wasn’t Blurr from Ibex?” Hot Rod asks quietly, gazing up at a thoroughly smashed billboard. The screen is a hundred thousand pieces on the ground, the frame hanging on its side, looming dangerously. It looks like it's one good windy day from collapsing entirely. Hot Rod remembers Blurr chattering about races and stadiums and the Ibex Cup that he won ten times in a row (or was it sixteen?); did he once walk past this very billboard, back when people were free to walk in the open, when they had streets to walk on and shops to visit?

“Uhh, Stanix, I think,” Arcee replies, peering into a mostly-collapsed once-alleyway. It leads to the west, and that’s the part of the city ruins they’re trying to get to, picking their way through old streets blocked with debris and mostly finding it easier to navigate through smaller, overlooked paths. “But I think he moved to Ibex pretty young. For the race tracks.”

“Stanix?” Hot Rod asks as he follows Arcee into the alleyway, climbing up the piles of rusted metal after her. He doesn’t know the name; there’s a lot of things he doesn’t know, and his cohort always look a bit pained when they have to explain something that’s obvious to them. Hot Rod tends to try not to take it personally; they’ve lost a lot, while he’s never really known what it’s like to _have_.

True to expectations, Arcee pauses, that sad-nostalgic-pained look crossing her face, but she doesn’t get the chance to answer. Something inside the rubble pile – which had been appearing on their scanners as stable – shifts beneath their weight, and something new appears in their HUDs: an explosive, likely dropped during one of the initial battles for Ibex and buried here unexploded for millions of years.

Arcee yells at Hot Rod to take cover, even as she lurches to the side, going for a large piece of sheet metal balanced as part of the pile to try and give her some cover. Hot Rod’s lower down, closer to the bomb, and he has nowhere to go, no way to try and make himself safer. He launches himself backwards, trying to get some distance, and twists and curls in on himself, so that the blast will hit his thickest armour, his arms covering his head and processor, entire body tucked around his spark chamber.

His sensitive spoiler wings are still exposed, though. The fierce heat rips through him, the shock-wave throwing him several mecha-metres away, the debris pile now breaking further, becoming nothing more than a thousand pieces of shrapnel thrown in every direction. The length of the war has ensured that battle-grade armour is considerably more sturdy than in those beginning years, which is the only reason why Hot Rod and Arcee aren’t dead, but it still does a lot of damage.

Hot Rod screams, he can’t help it. Over half of his sensor-suite is within his spoiler wings, and he has so many receptors there that the pain caused by injury to them inches closer to _agony_ than anything else. There’s a not-inconsiderable amount of time in which he is totally oblivious to the outside world, consumed entirely by his own pain.

By the time he’s next aware of anything outside the pain, Arcee’s EM field is right next to him, buzzing against his ruined sensors, and her voice is speaking to him, but he can’t parse the words.

“Ar-ar-cee?” he croaks out, voice laced with static and fizzling out intermittently. His audios are ringing still, but combat programs had them automatically filtering out the sudden noise, so it’s not as bad as it could be.

“Roddy,” she says, voice low and worried. “Can you hear me now?”

“Ye-yeah,” Hot Rod says. He can taste energon in his mouth.

He onlines his optics – one of them is cracked, a line of nothingness in the middle of his visual feed, and the other is pixelating quite bad around the edges. Arcee’s face blurs into view. She’s bleeding as well, tiny rivulets of dark pink energon on her light pink frame – the colour that screams _warning,_ the colour that tells people Arcee’s _dangerous –_ but none of the shrapnel seems to have compromised her internals, instead having scraped armour plating and in some cases embedded _just_ deep enough the nick lines, but – nothing that her self-repair can’t handle, as soon as they’re in a safe place to pick out the shards and maybe weld some of them a little.

(Once, Arcee would have likely died in such a blast. Now, her frame is upgraded to the point where she can walk it off. Hot Rod’s frame has always been capable of doing so, but sometimes he wonders about sacrifices made on the altar of war.

Do his companions reminisce, sometimes, about how much they’ve changed, _been_ changed, frame and mind and spark? He’s never asked, unsure if he wants to know the answer.)

“Good,” Arcee vents out in a sigh of relief. “C’mon, let’s get you to shelter. I need to – to see your spoiler.”

Oh. Oh, _Primus._ “Arcee,” Hot Rod says shakily. “I can’t – I can’t feel it. I’m – I’m _blind.”_

This is not, strictly speaking, true. His visual feed is working, if sub-optimally, but his spoiler wings held half of his entire sensor suite, and once the words _blind_ and _deaf_ have been ruled out, what other ones are there to describe such a loss of sense? So, while inaccurate, _blind_ is maybe the closest word to what effect Hot Rod’s sudden loss has had.

Arcee grimaces, looks at the wings that Hot Rod cannot see. “We’ll get them fixed up,” she says, but Hot Rod knows that tone; if it’s going to happen, it’s not going to be anytime soon. That’s the _we don’t have resources for that, but maybe one day_ voice.

Arcee helps Hot Rod stand, and together they find a building only partially collapsed to tuck themselves into the corner of. Hot Rod sinks down to the dirty floor gratefully, not even blinking at the grime and rust. Arcee settles beside him, pulls out a dampening chip, and gets it into one of Hot Rod’s medical ports, to help with the lingering pain.

Then she brushes a hand over the left spoiler wing, touch so light it’s barely there, but Hot Rod still flinches. Arcee pulls away instantly. “Sorry.”

Hot Rod tips his head towards her. “Iacon?” he asks. They can’t continue on like this; his sharp sensor-suite was a huge part of the reason why he and Arcee were sent together. Hot Rod’s the scout, and Arcee’s the brawn to back him up if they meet trouble.

Arcee nods. “Yeah, mission’s a bust. And, hey, if we pick up enough sensors on our way back, we might even be able to get you something fixed up sooner rather than later.” Her mouth twists into a grimace even as she says it.

Joy. More mutilation of corpses abandoned for millennia. “I can do that part,” Hot Rod offers, knowing how little Arcee likes dirty jobs like that.

But Arcee smiles at him wryly, “Don’t worry, Roddy, I’ll do it. You just focus on finding us a smooth way back. If we get into range, we can arrange a pick up.”

Hot Rod nods, accepting. The stumps of his spoiler wings – the yellow-gold now burnt and melted – twitch. They really should be more reinforced, but – that would mean less sensors, and right now, the ‘Bots _need_ his sensors. “’Kay.”

Arcee slides a hand onto Hot Rod’s forearm, palm resting on his triple barrel guns. “It’s gonna be okay, Roddy, we’ll get you fixed up back in Iacon.”

Hot Rod nods again, gaze going up to the sky visible through the wreck they’re in. Iacon’s pretty far away right now, as is the rest of their cell, and the rest of the Autobots. He tries not to feel unmoored.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> G1 Hot Rod is a baby who's trying his best and I love him so much. Also, Arcee is a BAMF no matter the universe, and, no, I don't take criticism.
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	21. Chronic Pain | IDW | Rodimus Prime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: background war, major character injury, chronic pain, terminal illness but for robots, mentioned societal romanticisation of death, implied PTSD, vague disregard for canon timelines (I think it fits, but I'm not 100% sure and also I don't care).

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 21 : I Don’t Feel So Well**

**Chronic Pain | ~~Hypothermia~~ | ~~Infection~~**

–

**IDW Rodimus Prime**

–

At first, Rodimus had a whole lot more immediate things to think about than the long-term effects of being literally shot in the spark and revived by the Matrix of Leadership. Surviving, for one thing. By the time the Matrix reformats him, by the time he gets back to the Autobots, it isn’t something that lingers in his head – and, to be fair, he isn’t exactly willing to dwell on the memory files.

Then he collapses in a corridor one day, fingers clenching uselessly against his chest, digging into the armour plating there, choking on the intense and sudden pain in his spark. His legs give out from under him, his knee plates hit the floor with a nasty crack, and he is slumped curled up on his side before he knows it, vocaliser spitting out static-laced whines.

His HUD floods with alerts, his visual feed glitches straight out of existence, and then he knows no more.

–

“Spark damage,” Ratchet declares, grimly. “Permanent.” The last word falls like the swing of an axe, cutting through the air and embedding in the bloodied plinth. _Permanent spark damage._ Even before the war, when their medical resources were far less stretched and scattered, such a diagnosis was… severe, to put it mildly.

Rodimus presses a hand to his chest, sliding his fingers carefully around the array of cords hooked into it, trailing off to a multitude of monitors. He doesn’t try to play pretend that he doesn’t know where he got such a grievous condition from. “Megatron shot me,” he says quietly, “right in the spark. I shoulda died _instantly,_ Ratchet.”

“Well, you didn’t,” Ratchet says, but his gaze catches on the exposed laser core, and the sigils and grooves marked into it from where the Matrix rested inside Rodimus’ chest. “And now there are consequences.”

Rodimus is quiet for a moment, his fingers falling away from the multitude of cords. His chest _aches,_ his whole frame feeling like he’s raced across the entirety of a battlefield, and is now shaking through the aftermath, battered and tired. All of his sensor-net is numb, but still the ache persists; it’s creating a strange dichotomy of feeling like he’s about to float away whilst simultaneously slumping down with weight, limbs too heavy to move. He’s an anchor tied to a dozen helium balloons, dragged along slowly by the wind. “What happens now?”

“Now?” Ratchet looks at Rodimus, looks at the monitor full of readings that Rodimus can’t understand, and sighs. “Now, we cope. Monitor. Manage. This – there’s no cure for this, Rodimus. This is damage you’ll have for the rest of your life.”

It goes without saying that Rodimus’ projected lifespan – not including the dangers posed by the fact that he’s a soldier at war – has just drastically shortened. “Details, Ratchet, please. Just – tell me how it is. What I’m going to have to do. How I’m going to live day to day.”

“Monitors on your spark chamber,” Ratchet begins, voice steady and soothing, in a way he’s hardly ever with patients who can run out of his med-bay only to end up back in it whenever they pull their next stupid stunt. Rodimus has been that patient before, but – not this time. “It’s – somehow, it’s not as bad as it should be.” _You should be dead._ “Your spark isn’t in danger of destabilising and dispersing. Your chamber isn’t compromised, uh, anymore; there’s no cracks or damage on either the laser core or photonic crystal. Your spark is just – scarred. It will cause you pain. _Constant_ pain, which may fluctuate in severity. Some days you’ll just ache, others you’ll be down on the floor screaming. I’m sorry, but I can’t put it any nicer than that.”

“Thanks,” Rodimus says, shuttering his optics, venting in, feeling the ache of a frame in perfect repair, tormented by the wounded spirit that animates it, “for being honest, instead of being nice.”

“Don’t thank me,” Ratchet snaps, but his frustration is not aimed at Rodimus. “I can’t do anything to help you besides monitor the situation. I’ll give you high-quality sensor-net dampening chips to take with you, but those only partially alleviate the symptoms. You’re going to be in pain for the rest of your life, Rodimus.”

Rodimus thinks of the constant, low-level throbbing that his frame has felt since Megatron shot him and he woke up with the Matrix in his chest, how it sometimes flared briefly into spikes of agony that were gone as soon as they came. He thinks of how he ignored it with all the focus of someone who’s hoping that if they don’t look at something, then maybe it will go away. Heh. Since when has _that_ ever worked?

“Yeah,” he says. “I know.”

–

Rodimus doesn’t let his new condition slow him down. Ratchet knows, as does Optimus Prime (the commanding officer for the Earth team), and technically no one else needs to know – medical confidentiality and all that – but Rodimus hems and haws about it before pulling Drift somewhere private and telling him as well.

Drift takes it even harder than Rodimus thought he would. Rodimus winces a little at the look on Drift’s face as Rodimus quietly tells him, and shows him the monitors in his chest, a show of trust if ever there was one, to bare his spark chamber, if not his spark, to someone who was once one of the Decepticons’ most prolific killers.

Rodimus touches, briefly – some things you can only talk _around –_ on the cause. The agony on Drift’s face at the thought of _Megatron_ being the one who held the gun… Rodimus doesn’t linger on it. He knows he means a lot to Drift, and that so does Megatron, no matter the divide of defection that stretches between the two now. Megatron shaped Drift in a way that Rodimus cannot touch – and, truthfully, does not want to touch – and to expect Drift to not have complicated feelings on the matter is nothing but an insult to him.

Drift presses a hand against Rodimus’ chest plate after he’s closed it up. That’s – that’s intimate, but Rodimus doesn’t pull away, for Drift is not unwelcome. “How long?” he asks softly, and Rodimus knows he means _How long do you have left to live?_

“I don’t know,” Rodimus answers, honestly. “There’s no destabilisation to scan and make a projection from. Even Ratchet can’t give me an estimate. I’ll just have to take it as it comes, I guess.”

“No destabilisation?” Drift asks, frowning. It goes against all previous medical knowledge of spark damage, after all: spark takes a hit somehow, spark loses stability, spark slowly – or not so slowly – unravels and disperses, eventually killing the mech it belongs to. It’s one of their species’ few terminal afflictions, and it’s as ugly in reality as it is romantic in fiction. It’s kind of like how humans once romanticised death by tuberculosis – consumption, as it was known then – or how _dying of a broken heart_ is viewed and used as a trope. Spark damage is seen time and time again in Cybertronian stories as a beautiful way to die, its nasty truth never touched upon.

Rodimus shakes his head. “No, just – scarring. Damage. And I – it hurts, Drift. All the time. I can’t – ” Rodimus cuts himself off, shakes his head. “Nothin’ I can do,” he says, quirking one corner of his lips up in a grin, “so let’s just keep livin’, yeah? See how far we get.”

–

Time passes, as it must. The war ends, not in clean victory, as it was never going to, just in a messy screeching halt involving alternate dimensions, Dead Universes, eldritch creatures made of darkness, and the sudden resetting of Cybertron via the mysterious Vector Sigma.

In short, Rodimus hurts like hell for most of it, but has not nearly the time to rest that he should.

The moment that it’s – not _over,_ because life goes on continuously, but maybe the moment where, if the universe were a story book, a new chapter would be about to begin – Rodimus ends up half collapsed on the floor and half collapsed on his berth, clutching his chest and weeping with pain.

Drift’s in the med-bay, though, and there’s no one around to see Rodimus cry, fingers scrabbling uselessly at his chest plate, spark tormented, spasms shaking his frame.

–

Then there’s a ship, and a crew, and Drift steadfast by his side, a familiar face, and Ultra Magnus, also steadfast, also reliable, newer but important in a startlingly short amount of time.

Ratchet’s there, and Rodimus is his own commanding officer now, so no one else needs to know. So he doesn’t tell them. Rodimus can’t stand pity.

And if he wakes about ready to purge some days, if he sometimes lounges in the captain’s chair with a plastered grin on his face, too silent and too loud in turns, pushing down the pain, if he races recklessly through the halls to celebrate the days where his pain is minimal, no matter how much it irritates Ultra Magnus? Well. That’s all just _Captain Rodimus at it again._ No need to look deeper, no sir.

It works, for a while. Then Thunderclash and his _Vis Vitalis_ dock with them and Rodimus is stuck in close contact with someone who pretty much takes one look at him and knows instantly what’s going on.

He plays up his dislike of Thunderclash to better have excuse to avoid him, but even the _Lost Light_ is only so big. He gets cornered in one of the observatory decks.

“How long?” Thunderclash asks, and damn him to the Pit, he even manages to look genuinely concerned.

“Few years. Not as long as you.” Rodimus waves it off, as though by sheer force of will the difference in their respective time suffering makes his pain any less. (Spoiler: it doesn’t.)

“And you haven’t got a life support system?” Thunderclash presses, and, _oh,_ that’s where he’s going with this. This is a _get it together, you’re being short-sightedly idiotic_ kind of speech. “Do you need to use mine, aboard the _Vis Vitalis?_ I’m sure it wouldn’t be too much work for my crew to configure it to attune to your spark signature – ”

Rodimus hastily holds up a hand to stop Thunderclash before he can go on further. He feels surprised at the unthinking offer, but immediately after realises he shouldn’t be: Thunderclash is well known as an earnest do-gooder, and no matter what petty jealousies Rodimus wants to level at him – more a sign of his own insecurities, and even _he_ knows that, so get off his back about it, _Rung –_ such a thing is well within expectations. “No, I – thanks for the offer,” Rodimus forces out the words, “but my – spark damage isn’t – it’s not like that.”

Thunderclash pauses, arranges himself and his face carefully, and Rodimus stubbornly tells himself that the empathy of The Greatest Autobot Ever is an over-reaction and is not welcome in any way. “What is it like, for you?” he asks, not disbelieving for an instant Rodimus’ words, _frag him._

“Scarring,” Rodimus answers shortly. “No destabilisation. Probably got the Matrix to thank for that.” He doesn’t go into detail about the chronic pain. Thunderclash _knows._ He turns away, finished with the conversation, and Thunderclash lets him go.

–

Rodimus’ spark screams in agony inside his chest the day he looks up at Megatron – right in the optic, because slag it, he’s not a coward – and steps back to allow the larger mech passage on to the _Lost Light,_ to take up the newly-made _co-captain_ position _._

Megatron looks down at him, red optics unreadable, and his face is different to how it was those scant few years ago, when he blasted Rodimus into pieces like he was nothing. Even a rebuild only accounts for some of it.

But Rodimus doesn’t care. Drift is gone. Ratchet pretty much hates him. The crew distrusts him, no matter what the results of the election were. And _Fragging Megatron_ is now his fellow officer; no, more than that – as _co-captain,_ Megatron will be required to be briefed on Rodimus’ spark condition, and he’s going to know _exactly where it came from._

Rodimus gets through the rest of the day – somehow – and locks himself in his hab suite, shivering and shaking, his spark flaming. He doesn’t come out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, do you ever think about how getting shot in the spark might have long term consequences for Rodimus? [MagicalSpaceDragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagicalSpaceDragon) did, and, a couple of weeks later when I saw the prompt list, I recalled our conversation. And so, this was born.
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	22. Withdrawal | IDW | Deadlock + Megatron

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: background dystopic society, drug addiction, drug withdrawal, kidnapping, vague reference to prostitution, references to the Functionists and their bullshit.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 22: Do These Tacos Taste Funny To You?**

**~~Poisoned~~ | ~~Drugged~~ | Withdrawal**

–

**IDW Deadlock + Megatron**

–

It’s Megatron who helps him through the withdrawal stages when Drift – now Deadlock – first decides to get off drugs.

He’s the most logical choice: Megatron is his new leader, has taken responsibility for him, and is big and strong and capable of containing Deadlock through the infamously-hideous syk withdrawal symptoms. The other Decepticons – they are few, but growing in number by the day – have jobs and missions and this and that to keep them busy; Megatron is running the Decepticon movement from the secret basement level of a Tarnian warehouse, and has the option of staying inside for days and weeks at a time with no one noticing.

So Deadlock asks, determinedly meeting Megatron’s optics, refusing to feel shame for being an addict, refusing to feel shame for asking for help. If nothing else, this is a _test._ Is Megatron full of pretty words and nothing more? Or will he commit to action? Will he _help?_ Does he _care?_

“Yes,” Megatron answers. “Yes, of course I’ll help. I’ve got another speech in two days, but if I get Starscream and Soundwave on managing whatever fallout occurs, then I’ll be freed up to help you through. Will you last until then, or should I rearrange things?”

Deadlock somehow manages not to stumble over his answer, spark pulsing at the instant agreement, the instant _reaching back_ Megatron had done. “That’s fine. I’ve – already been off for some days, and – about the time you’re saying is when the craving will get bad again. Here, or elsewhere?”

“Here,” Megatron answers, “if it hasn’t been compromised by then.”

–

The speech goes smoothly – no Senate-paid assassins turn up, which is the ruler they’re measuring by these days – and Megatron is back down in the Tarnian warehouse basement within several hours of vacating the site of the rally. Deadlock hadn’t gone, already twitchy and shivering, uncertain of the solidity of the control he had over his own frame.

Syk withdrawals are notoriously terrible. It’s a Class-Alpha drug for a reason, highly addictive and highly dangerous. Mecha _die_ from withdrawal, a fact that kills almost as many users as overdose. But Deadlock didn’t go into this unknowing of the risks: he wants his frame, his _mind,_ to be his own again, not slaving away to the high.

So he lays on his berth and shivers uncontrollably. They will only get worse from here, until his frame is undergoing full-on involuntary spasms, the pistons pressurising and depressurising, gears winding and unwinding, cables tightening and then loosening, and all of it without any input from him. Deadlock’s been through these early stages before, when he hadn’t enough shanix to pay up, and the dealers weren’t accepting _alternate methods of payment…_

The pain in his tanks as all his energon is used up too fast, the racing pace of his fuel pump as it’s forced to process too fast, the vicious wracking of his frame, and, above all else, the mind-consuming _hunger,_ the _crave,_ for another hit. Yes, he’s been through these before, has seen others on the streets and tracks of Rodion stumble around with shivering frames and too-bright optics, expressions of desperate hunger, something almost entirely removed from the pang of empty fuel tanks and flickering red low fuel warnings in a HUD. It isn’t an uncommon sight, down there in the Dead End, where the dregs of society are cast down to waste away and die.

Megatron sits beside him, a data-pad in his hands, but he’s not writing in it, so it can’t be poetry. Deadlock asks, gritting his denta through the shivering, fighting the urge to get up and search uselessly for syk he already knows isn’t around, “What’s that?”

Megatron’s optics flick up to Deadlock, down to the data-pad, and then back up to Deadlock. “Medical text,” he answers, “about drug addiction treatments. Soundwave got a hold of it for me.”

The Decepticons had definitely not had _that_ data-pad before. Not that Deadlock would have been able to read it – his reading skills are still beginner level, though Megatron is a surprisingly patient teacher, and Deadlock can recognise the standard set of glyphs now, can even string together simple words, but longer ones are still beyond him, let alone complex medical terms – but the data-pad has two scratches on one corner, like some mech had sat there reading it, worrying the corner between two maybe-clawed digits as he did so. Deadlock might not be able to read all that well yet, but he would have noticed that data-pad amongst their small collection, ever-growing by the day as the Decepticons gain more members, more resources.

“Recently?” Deadlock asks, though he knows it was. His frame tightens and loosens, jerking on the berth, and his vocaliser glitches static for a moment. Deadlock ignores it: the worst stages are still yet to come, and he’s not going to fail at the first hurdle.

Megatron inclines his head, “Yes,” he says softly, “after our conversation two days ago. Bit of a rush order, maybe, but Ravage came through for us. Withdrawal is dangerous, even when one knows all the risks, and more so when ignorant. I – despise ignorance, especially my own.” _I got it for you,_ is what goes unsaid, but not unheard.

“Careful,” Deadlock says, “or we might need a bigger pad-shelf. An’ it’s cramped enough down here already.” _Thank you._

Megatron smiles, and it’s a strange kind of smile, bitter and sad and victorious at the same time. “Once, it was my dream to have enough data-pads that I could fill a shelf,” he says. “And that I could have them, and display them openly. Simple dreams for simple times, I suppose.”

Deadlock recalls that miners aren’t supposed to be able to read, and that Megatron taught himself. To own any kind of data-pad was as good to admitting to breaking the rules – a piece of literature implied literacy, and while it’s not strictly against Senate law to own things or to pay for classes, in reality, the Functionist Council rather uses such signs to track down dissenters, even just potential ones, and eliminate any who question why things are the way they are. Megatron owning a single data-pad could have been a death sentence for him, at one point.

“I think we’re beyond simple dreams now,” Deadlock says, his fans clicking to a higher setting as his frame heats up from the increased fuel processing. Megatron already has cooling pads to help, reaching to place them on strategic points on Deadlock’s frame, where underneath the armour critical systems are overclocking horrendously, producing far too much heat.

“The dream is still simple,” Megatron sighs, “it’s the methods that are getting complicated.”

–

Deadlock convalesces for over two months. Megatron – despite the data-pad, despite Deadlock’s own warnings, despite rushed talks with experienced ‘Cons when Deadlock first entered an unwanted forced stasis-lock – is nervous and restless. He knows, like anyone, that withdrawal hits hard. That it hits _harder_ on addicts who’ve been under a drug’s spell for longer.

Deadlock has never made secret of being an addict. Possibly doesn’t even think to – in the Dead End, there is no shame to be found when in a line up of ten mecha, around seven of them will be similarly hooked on something or another. Megatron knows the situation is bad, had once worked in Rodion’s mines after Tarn’s had begun to run dry, but even still it has never been a pleasant sight to see a mech Megatron is swiftly coming to call a _friend_ so dependant on something so terribly bad for him.

Deadlock’s first stage – involuntary frame spasms and overheating – goes relatively smoothly, according to the data-pad Ravage filched from a nice clean hospital, the likes of which no mech currently in the Decepticons had ever been allowed inside of. By that, Megatron means that Deadlock had still been lucid by the time the shivers had trailed off, his frame had cooled, and the system purges had started battering his abused frame as his self-repair tried to cleanse itself of the syk remnants lingering in every system. The Class-Alpha drug comes as a lurid neon-green liquid, injected directing into the fuel lines, and from there spreads _everywhere._ Megatron would be more than happy to never see those kind of syringes again, though he knows that such a want is likely to go nowhere.

Deadlock had remained mostly-coherent, if exhausted, throughout the tank purges, sagging in Megatron’s arms – and, _Primus,_ how could such a dangerous mech feel so _small,_ so _fragile_ in Megatron’s large arms? – but come the third stage, the self-repair systems cleansing the fuel lines and more delicate systems, Deadlock had succumbed to a forced stasis-lock from which he had pretty much a fifty-fifty chance of awakening from if left on his own.

It’s an untenable situation. Megatron sits at Deadlock’s berth side and knows that he has to make a decision: to leave Deadlock alone would be safer for the Decepticons over-all, less likely to expose them to the now ever-watchful enforcers. It’s also an abhorrent thought, when it means that his friend might die, when getting him to a medic would raise his chances of survival above eighty-five per cent. Syk, after all, is the drug used to help subjugate the mecha that the government doesn’t want. In a clinical environment, the survival rate of withdrawal rises exponentially. Too bad that most addicts don’t get within a mecha-mile of such a place, and if they did would be most likely turned away at the door.

Deadlock’s been lucky to make it this far, but as his stasis-lock grows ever-longer by the day, his chances slip lower.

Megatron takes Deadlock’s hand, so small in his own, so cold with his systems only warm around his chest, only his most vital components still whirring away as his frame fights to live.

“I promised myself I would leave nobody behind,” Megatron tells Deadlock quietly.

–

Ratchet has an absolutely terrible fragging headache when he wakes up. He groans, his arms moving up to his helm, his fingers seeking out any dents – there are none – and he loads up his last memory files, fully expecting to have a fragmented scene of a bar filter into his HUD. He hasn’t had a hangover in centuries – too good with drinking to get so easily overcharged – but it’s still possible of course, though he doesn’t have a strange taste in his mouth, as is typical of having perhaps a bit too much fun the previous night.

Instead, the memories of a strange mech in his hab suite with a stunning blaster tell him that he might be in a much worse situation than previously anticipated.

Ratchet lurches up, optics flickering on too slowly, and observes three things: he is on a berth in a small room, there is another berth with a mech lying on it along the other wall, and there is a second mech sitting in a chair next to the first, prone mech, whose red optics are watching him back, narrow and shrewd.

It takes Ratchet a moment – lag is a typical after-effect of having all your systems forcibly shut down and reset – but then he places a name to the face. “Megatron?” he says, the face of the mech the Senate _hates_ a recognisable sight, what with all the coverage he’s getting on the news. Orion likes him, Ratchet knows, likes his speeches, what he says. Ratchet’s – more wary. Oh, he _agrees_ that Megatron’s _right_ about pretty much everything, but he’s witnessed the Senate and Council's work before, and he’s not going to jump ship onto a sinking vessel. Megatron’s made more than enough enemies already.

Megatron inclines his head. “Ratchet. Medic to the Primes.”

“What am I doing here?” Ratchet demands gruffly, swinging his legs over the side of the berth, standing up. “You won’t get many recruits via kidnapping, if that’s your angle.” Ratchet can’t think of another reason that he might have been taken; everyone knows that the Decepticons are mostly lower-caste mecha, and none of them will have proper medical training. Tactics would say acquiring a medic would be a high priority, but Ratchet’s neck doesn’t bow easily.

Megatron barks out a short, sharp laugh, little to no amusement in it. “Oh, while you would be a most welcome addition to my cause, I have another reason for your presence here.” He stands up – and, damn it, Ratchet knew that Megatron was a big mech, but it’s different seeing it in person – and gestures at the prone mech on the other berth.

Ratchet looks, and – the paint’s now a different colour, there’s been a couple of mods added, but. He _knows_ that face. It’s the _kid,_ the one Ratchet had treated so long ago, one amongst many but he had stuck in the mind somehow, Ratchet’s thoughts occasionally cycling back to him without input.

Ratchet steps towards the berth unconsciously, before he’s even aware of having moved, before his optics catch up with him and start filing away everything that’s visibly wrong, medical programs firing up and telling Ratchet that the kid is in stasis-lock rather than recharge, telling him that his frame is drained and battered and struggling through something doggedly. Ratchet’s seen what mecha look when they’re fighting for their lives on medical berths, and this isn’t a medical berth with an array of monitors, but it’s an otherwise familiar sight.

“Repair him,” Megatron says, making his tone authoritative, ready to argue against a denial, as though Ratchet were going to refuse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love the early Decepticons and young Megatron. Let's see if Ratchet's no-nonsense influence can help them stay on-course.
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	23. Exhaustion | G1 | Rodimus Prime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: background war, sleep deprivation, being crushed under expectations and pressure to perform, self-confidence issues, implied violence, trying your absolute best when nobody else is playing ball.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 23 : What’s A Whumpee Gotta Do To Get Some Sleep Around Here?**

**Exhaustion | ~~Narcolepsy~~ | Sleep Deprivation**

–

**G1 Rodimus Prime**

–

The thing that no one ever warned Rodimus about, back when he was still Hot Rod, still young, still _himself,_ is that being the Prime is _exhausting._

Now, to be fair, Rodimus’ ascension to Prime was very unusual. None other has ever kick-started their reign with the destruction of their species’ Dark God of Chaos, whilst simultaneously ousting their millions of years long enemies from Cybertron, leaving the ruined planet free for Autobot reoccupation, after all. But Hot Rod’s luck has always been a bit screwy, and he sees no reason why Rodimus’ wouldn’t be the same.

Anyway, there’s a hell of a lot to do and not enough hours in the day to do it all in. There’s the minutiae of running an army – if the Autobots could even be called such anymore, their numbers are so few, maybe they’re more like a militia at this point – all the drudgery of keeping bases running smoothly, the roster up to date, having never-ending meetings with command staff he now has to learn a whole new dynamic with, approving or rejecting requests, reading reports, securing supplies, liaising with their human allies, smoothing over any complaints, administering discipline for infractions, on and on and on it goes. Rodimus never has a single moment to rest before something else needs the Prime’s attention _right now._

In short, Rodimus is stressed. And all of the above still doesn’t touch on the worry of not being good enough, the sudden learning curve that comes with going from being a soldier with no rank to the soldier with the highest rank – with no officer training! – and the ever-constant weight of Optimus’ shadow stretching long and dark before him. Rodimus _knows_ that everyone wants Optimus back – he’s in the same escape pod as all the rest – but _tough luck,_ because Rodimus can’t do that for them. Rodimus can’t do a lot of things they want him to do, but no one’s reaching out to _help him._ They just look at him with searching optics and find him _lacking._

And he’s _trying._ He’s trying _so hard._ He’s giving up recharge cycles to do more work, drinking his energon ration at his desk instead of in the mess, he’s skipping out on time with Springer and Arcee – who look at him differently now, even if they try not to – to spend it instead in meetings and appointments with a host of officers who’ve all got a hell of a lot more to bring to the table than him.

All he’s got is the Matrix. And that thing doesn’t do much more than hum inside his chest and give him occasional feelings about things. Daniel used to, when he was younger, play a hide-the-object game with his friends, who would tell the seeker whether they were getting warmer or colder depending on how close they were to the object that was hidden. The Matrix? It’s kind of like that. Because Primus forbid that it be _clear_ or anything.

It’s all just – disheartening, that’s all. Rodimus is trying his very best, and it just doesn’t seem to be enough. He knows it. Everyone knows it. Pit, even the _Decepticons_ know it, though their clashes with their erstwhile enemies have tapered off as of late. It’s about the only good thing to have come from the desolate yet hectic aftermath of Unicron.

He’s tired. No, not just tired: absolutely strut-deep _exhausted._ But he has no time to be tired – there’s so much work to do.

–

Rodimus finally makes it to his quarters – so large, so _different_ to what he had before, so much more _isolated –_ at 01:34 a.m. by Earth time.

He went from the shuttle bay in Autobot City – after a several hour ride from Iacon – and straight into his office at 15:57 p.m. the day before, and neither paperwork nor meetings wait for any mech. So, yeah, he’s glad to finally get laid down on a berth. The past few days have been busy up at Iacon, and his frame and processor are lagging now, in desperate need of a shut down and defrag after only snatches of recharge for the past week.

At 03:27 a.m. his comm comes online and wakes him. The call – Red Alert informing him of _suspicious activity caught by the sensors –_ is settled as being a wandering pack of coyotes after Rodimus pulls up the roster in his HUD and pings Bumblebee, the spec ops mech currently on duty, to go and scout for Red Alert. He falls back into recharge, the matter resolved, at 04:08 a.m.

At 05:15 a.m., on the dot as he ever is, Ultra Magnus pings Rodimus to request an appointment at some point in the day. Rodimus – who has learnt by now that Magnus likes having a weekly check-in in a way that is perhaps too telling of the millions of years of solitude he was separated from the Prime and the rest of the High Command team – schedules him in for a slot at 14:00 p.m. Rodimus hopes that he will have had a chance to grab a cube for a midday refuelling by then, but his hopes are not too high. Magnus thanks him – not in as many words, but the stilted intent is there – and clicks off of the channel.

Rodimus goes back into recharge. His HUD is full of interrupted and incomplete bars signalling that his defragging isn’t anywhere near complete, but that’s become such a familiar sight by now that he barely registers it.

His internal chronometer wakes him at 06:30 a.m. with a chime, Rodimus groaning and wishing futilely for it to be for anyone other than him, and his day begins.

–

Rodimus stands from his place at the head of the meeting table, locking his joints to keep from swaying, waiting for his pixelating visual feed to stabilise, and watches his officers leave the room.

“You okay, Prime?” Jazz asks when it’s just the two of them, his blue visor inscrutable. Rodimus tilts his head – ignoring the throbbing helm ache that’s now a near-constant backdrop to his life – in question. Jazz elaborates, “You don’t look so hot.”

_I don’t feel so hot,_ Rodimus wants to say, but – the Prime has to be strong, has to be infallible, has to be _beyond such mundane things as utter exhaustion._ “Bit of a helm ache, that’s all,” he says, knowing that Jazz, the third in command and the head of special operations for millions of years, will pick up on anything less than at least a form of the truth.

Jazz nods, friendly enough, and visibly lets it go. “Hope it passes soon, Prime.” He turns and leaves the room, the door swishing shut behind him, and then Rodimus is alone.

Rodimus grimaces, now that there’s no audience to put on strong face for. Yep, Jazz had picked up on that not being the whole story, but he’s choosing to trust in his Prime, and Rodimus _can’t let him down._

He walks out of the room, slower than he normally would, his optics maybe a bit too bright to compensate for the way his sight keeps blanking on him in short intermittent bursts. His balancing stabilisers have been a bit glitchy recently, and he has no desire to trip on nothing. Rodimus restrains the urge to place his hand on the wall and use it to help him along. He’s not _that_ unsteady.

–

As seems to always be the case these days, it’s _Galvatron_ who ruins the precarious balancing act Rodimus is walking.

The Decepticons are raiding a mining colony on a moon, and the Autobots have been called in to stop them. There was a very distinct _they’re_ _ **your problem**_ _so_ _ **you**_ _deal with them_ tone to the plea for help from the colony’s officials, but since the ‘Cons _are,_ actually, Rodimus’ problem, he doesn’t take too much offence.

He’s already made the arguments in the war room for letting the ‘Cons get away with a certain amount of resources – traditionalists like Ultra Magnus found the idea antithesis to the ‘Bot cause – but Rodimus had made the point that if the ‘Cons had enough resources to not make them desperate, and therefore unpredictable and vicious, but not enough to fuel any proper campaigns, then the ‘Bots would be placing people in _less_ danger than if they starved the ‘Cons of resources entirely.

(Unspoken is the fact that starving their enemies to death is incredibly cruel, but Rodimus knows that a lot of ‘Bots just don’t think that way. They see a problem, they solve the problem. Long-term consequences and repercussions don’t seem to factor in. Ultra Magnus had gone quiet when Rodimus spelt it out for him, his face twisting in uncomfortable understanding, before he bowed and said, “Yes, my Prime.”

Rodimus still isn’t sure if those words were meant as an acknowledgement of a good point, or the deference to an order Magnus still didn’t agree with but would follow through anyway. He’s not quite sure he wants to know. It’s one of the first times he’s actually overridden his officers with his rank, and it’s more than a bit nerve-wracking.

Jazz had nodded in a more open acceptance anyway, shooting Rodimus a quirk of a smile when Magnus had bowed his head. Rodimus is still uncertain whether he managed to pick out respect in Jazz’s perpetually hard-to-read EM field or not, but he hopes he did. It would be nice if _someone_ from the Old Guard respected him.)

So, anyway, Galvatron. Rodimus engages him in hand-to-hand combat as per usual, their fight taking them somewhat away from the rest of the battlefield. The moon is incredibly rocky, and they manage to roll themselves straight down a small crevice, falling too far to not get horribly dented, both clinging to each other instinctually, their fight forgotten in the fall.

Rodimus gets knocked offline by the impact, and, okay, it was the _fall_ that exposed his growing health problems, but he’s still going to blame _Galvatron._

–

Rodimus blinks online at the feeling of someone shaking him very roughly. His audio feed is more than a bit unstable, glitching and muffled, but he soon manages to parse the noise into words: “Prime, Prime!” repeated over and over.

He switches on his visual feed, squinting through the pixelation. A silver and blue-purple blob shifts and comes into focus as Galvatron’s face, red optics narrowed. Rodimus tries to speak, but his vocaliser is lagging, and he doesn’t manage to before Galvatron is speaking again.

“Awake, Prime?” he asks.

Rodimus shakily nods, and – why the _frag_ is he still alive? He was knocked straight into stasis and Galvatron decided to wake him up instead of just shooting him in the head while he was down? What is up with that?

Rodimus finds his arms gripped onto by Galvatron and himself pulled up to sit, back propped up against the crevice wall, rather than laid prone on the ground. _Why?_ He wants to ask again, but he keeps silent. His spoiler wings are dented, but Galvatron is – perhaps not _gentle,_ exactly, but he is _careful –_ as he leans Rodimus against the rocky wall.

“What brought you to this state, Prime?” Galvatron demands brusquely, standing above Rodimus, looming over and crossing his arms, that amber cannon pointing away from Rodimus for once. “You would deceive me into fighting a dishonourable battle?”

Rodimus just – blanks. “Wh-hat?” he manages to get his lagging vocaliser to croak out after a moment.

Galvatron gestures sharply. “You are in no fit state to fight!” he says, which – true, but not something Rodimus was exactly expecting Galvatron to take _offence to._ “Any victory I win now is no victory at all! I would not have defeated the Chosen One on my own merits, and no Decepticon would ever respect me for it. I wouldn’t respect myself! What is _wrong,_ Prime?”

“Err…” Rodimus stalls. He tries to rise up, leaning more weight against the rocky wall than he wants to admit – though by Galvatron’s sharp optics and curling mouth his enemy hasn’t missed it – and finally manages to look across instead of up at the Decepticon leader.

“Well?” Galvatron demands again.

Rodimus blinks, wobbles in place, locks his joints, and says, “It’s nothing.”

Galvatron makes a strangled roar, before aiming his cannon high on the rocky wall and blasting. Jazz falls from a shadowed crack in a tumble of rubble, twisting in mid-air to land on his pedes more nimbly than Rodimus ever could, aiming his blaster at Galvatron.

“You,” Galvatron says sharply, “are to stop forcing my nemesis to neglect his health, you pathetic failure of a mech. I don’t know what ridiculous demands Autobots make of their Prime, but surely even basic logic dictates that rendering your strongest unable to fight is _lunacy?!_ Bah! I’m out of here – see you next time, Prime! And you’ll give me a _real battle!”_

Rodimus watches as Galvatron activates his anti-gravity thrusters and flies away, avoiding the shots Jazz sends after him with more grace than any would expect of such a large mech. He swiftly disappears, leaving Rodimus alone with Jazz at the bottom of the crevice.

“Prime?” Jazz says, and this time it’s low and concerned.

Rodimus winces, swaying in place. His HUD is swamped with red lines as he shifts his grip on the wall, exhaustion weighing him down. He shutters his optics. _Failure. Not good enough. Weak._

Jazz’s hands grip him, hold him steady, and Rodimus can barely feel them.

“Let’s get you to First Aid,” Jazz says, his voice sounding more distant than his EM field tells Rodimus he is. With difficulty, Rodimus nods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> G1 Rodimus Prime must have had a hard adjustment :( Also, apparently my trick for making G1 fills longer is just "add Galvatron" at this point.
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	24. Forced Mutism | SG G1 | Hot Rod + Optimus Prime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: background war, torture as a form of discipline, sensory deprivation, emotional manipulation, emotional abuse, physical abuse, slavery, torture in general, begging, forced mutism, forced blindness, implied memory modification/damage, cult-like worship of a literally evil god and his prophet. 
> 
> **Listen up guys this one goes hard so please heed the warnings.**

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 24 : You’re Not Making Any Sense**

**Forced Mutism | ~~Blindfolded~~ | Sensory Deprivation **

–

**SG G1 Hot Rod + Optimus Prime**

–

“You know,” Optimus says, slowly, mockingly, like he’s talking to some poor fool gone astray, “if you were just _better,_ then I wouldn’t have to do this.”

Hot Rod grits his denta together, wincing, cowed. His red optics are both smashed, the glass in shards, the lights and sensors broken by the _push_ of his master’s thumbs, when he’d held Hot Rod’s face so gently earlier, caressed his helm, pulled him close – and _shattered_ his optics for failing him.

Hot Rod wants to speak out in his own defence, but his vocaliser has been torn out as well, his neck cables bent and leaking, his throat sparking with broken wires. He moves his mouth instead, around the shapes of the words he cannot speak. _“Please, master! I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry, I’ll do better!”_

Optimus tuts. He’s not in the room, he’s on the intercom, presumably watching Hot Rod stumble about through the one-way glass and the various cameras. There’s a speaker in every corner, and more scattered about besides, and Hot Rod’s sensor-suite has been forced offline by Ratchet’s callous hands, and he can barely orient himself into standing upright, let alone trying to figure out where the door is, where the glass wall is, which way he should face to assure his master he _didn’t mean to fail._

“ _Master! Please!”_

“I only want what’s best for you,” Optimus says, and he sounds so sad, how could Hot Rod have _ever_ failed him this way, disappointed him so much? “You know that, right?”

Hot Rod _does._ It’s what the Prime wants for _everyone._ To make Cybertron and all its inhabitants great and powerful, kept safe and shining under his rule. Hot Rod barely remembers life before the war – extensive damage to his memory files have long since corrupted details straight out of existence – but he remembers being alone, and scared, and hurt, and then Optimus had been there, stretching out a hand, pulling Hot Rod up and out into the light.

It’s a debt Hot Rod can never repay. He knows that. So surely he can _do his best?_ Surely he can endeavour to not let his master down?

“I want to make you the best version of yourself you could ever be,” Optimus continues, mournfully, “and, sometimes… that means having to play the villain. It hurts me to do this, Hot Rod, it truly does. But I cannot tolerate failure.”

No, of course he can’t. Hot Rod understands. _Failure_ means _weakness._ And _weakness_ is not allowed to exist in Optimus’ perfect world. Hot Rod sways on his pedes, hangs his head. Shame fills him up, bitter and icy.

“ _I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”_ he mouths, probably to the floor. His gyros spin sickeningly, but his tank is empty, so even though his fuel processing system makes unhappy motions in the back of his intake, there’s nothing to purge up.

“I accept your apology,” Optimus says.

Warmth buoys Hot Rod up. _Yes!_ Optimus knows he’s sorry, that he regrets. Knows that his subordinate is not disloyal, not traitorous, or intentionally weak (which is almost as bad). Maybe, perhaps, he might even…?

“But I’m sorry,” Optimus cuts into Hot Rod’s meagre hopes. “I cannot show mercy. You _know_ what the punishment for failure is. Unless you wish to be treated like you’re _special…?”_

Hot Rod feels only the barest twinge of pain as his shallow hopes are dashed – he didn’t truly expect mercy – and he shakes his helm frantically, even though that makes his balance worse, stumbling in place. No! He’s not special! He’s one of the Autobots, not some _Decepticon_ wanting special treatment in the new world. He doesn’t think of himself as _too good_ to bow down to the Prime!

“Good,” Optimus sounds pleased. “I knew you weren’t like that, Hot Rod. You’ve been with me for a long time; I know your character. It’s just, sometimes, with the Decepticon rebels so resistant to being stamped out… I cannot help but wonder at the loyalty of some of my Autobots.”

“ _No!”_ Hot Rod sways in place again, clenching and unclenching his hands, reaching out as though to reassure, arms hanging empty in the room with only himself in it. _“Not me, I’m loyal, I swear…”_

Optimus hums over the intercom, static crackling throughout the room. “Stay that way, Hot Rod, and we won’t have problems.”

Hot Rod nods hurriedly, intake contracting again as his frame tries to initiate a purge but finds nothing to do it with. Even his HUD is dark to him, courtesy of Ratchet, but Hot Rod knows that if he could see it, there’d be a low energon warning blinking at him incessantly.

“I’m going to start now,” Optimus warns. “It’ll be done and over with before you know it, old friend.”

Hot Rod shivers in place, bracing himself for what he knows is coming. Pain is pain is pain, and succumbing to it is _weak._

His pedes warming up is the only warning he gets before the electrified floor is lancing hot pain through his frame in cutting arcs, and the laser turrets in the walls begin to fire low-power shots randomly, so there’s no way to brace for them at all.

Hot Rod cries out, falling to his knees, and more pain shatters through his strained systems, blowing out fuses and overloading circuitry. This isn’t the _good_ kind of overload, either. This is an uncontrolled attack on his systems, not within their purview, and they try and fail to ground the excess.

The Disciplinary Room was created aeons ago, and Hot Rod is unfortunately familiar with it. Most Autobots are. It’s Optimus’ hands-off approach to punishment, for when a stay in the brig isn’t enough.

(Hot Rod actually prefers the Disciplinary Room over the brig. Here, at least, it’s all over pretty quick. The brig, meanwhile, is a grinding stay in total sensory deprivation for several days, and while there’s not any physical pain, the things your processor can come up with make the whole experience… unenjoyable. Unmerciful. Hot Rod would rather get it over and done with, please and thank you.)

A shot catches Hot Rod in the arm, and, okay, it’s low-power because Optimus is looking to make him _hurt,_ not to badly injure him, but it scorched straight across his triple-barrel forearm guns, and Optimus _knows_ how sensitive those are. Hot Rod would be yowling in pain if he could make a sound.

It’s maybe for the best that he’s been silenced, actually. A show of mercy. There are some Autobots around who, when hearing screams, would come running to join in. Hot Rod’s no coward, no stranger to pain, but being put on show, his failure making him a _laughing stock…_ no. Optimus extended this kindness, and Hot Rod mentally grasps on to it with all his might. He may have _failed,_ but Optimus truly wants to help him, not be cruel.

“Get up,” says Optimus.

Hot Rod obeys – he doesn’t even think of not doing so – staggering up to his feet, opening himself up to the turrets more, exposing more of his battered frame to their bite. The zapping under his pedes has lessened slightly, but still zings up sharp cuts of pain, though now on an intermittent, random basis, unable to be predicted. He thinks his tyres might be smoking a little, but his olfactory sensor is offline, and he cannot tell.

“Good mech,” Optimus praises.

Hot Rod would preen at that if he weren’t so unsteady. His helm aches, and the holes where his optics were must be sparking wildly, and he thinks he can feel energon and cleansing fluid leaking down his faceplates, but he isn’t sure. He must look a right sight, but he knows that Optimus finds such things beautiful.

_Stripped down and screaming with pain is when a mech is at their truest, their most primal,_ Optimus had once said to him. _It is then that you can see the honest beauty of their ember, how it struggles to reach for life even in the depths of agony and torment. It is a wondrous sight to behold – rip everything false about a mech away, and inside you will find that smouldering ember Primus gave him, the sight that our god sees._

“Remain standing,” Optimus orders.

Hot Rod does his best, planting his pedes wide and lowering his centre of balance, as the blasts from the turrets increase in frequency, hitting him from random directions. He sways, he buckles, he nearly goes down one time, but he _remains standing,_ as per his master’s wishes. He is _not weak._

“Good mech,” Optimus praises again. “You’re doing so well. Now, who are you?”

“ _Hot Rod,”_ Hot Rod mouths. He still cannot tell where he’s facing, but he trusts that if it’s not the right way, Optimus has him on the cameras.

“And what are you?”

“ _An Autobot.”_

“And who do you belong to?”

“ _My master.”_

“And who is your master?”

“ _Optimus Prime.”_

“Good,” Optimus croons. “Very, very good. I’m proud of you.”

–

Later, cycling measured vents on a berth in Ratchet’s – med-bay is perhaps a generous term, but it’s the closest thing the Autobots have got, they lost _so much_ at the start of the war to Decepticon selfishness and their stealing of the planetary databases – Hot Rod stares up at the dented orange ceiling through pixelating optics, his visual feed still horrendously laggy and full of blind spots.

His time in the Disciplinary Room had been short, all in all. Optimus truly had extended some mercy, keeping Hot Rod’s time locked in there low, about an hour. Hot Rod feels grateful for the show of kindness; his failure on the mission – letting the Decepticon insurgents get away – had certainly warranted worse. 

“Up you get,” Ratchet grumps at him, shoving him off the berth. “You’re well enough to make your way back to your quarters – unless you _want_ to see what I’ve last been working on?” He sounds disturbingly hopeful.

Hot Rod very much does _not_ want to have some limb of his replaced with a circular saw or the like. “I’m goin’, I’m goin’” he wheezes out through the static of his replaced vocaliser, probably the same one their master tore out earlier.

He gets up, stumbles out of the room. Down the halls of the base, past the corpse with the wings embedded at the intersection near the meeting rooms, nearly tilting into the one with no legs near the corridor leading to the storage rooms, and finally practically collapsing against his own door – neatly avoiding the wall with the missing plating, which exposes the uninsulated high-voltage electric cables out to the open air, and Hot Rod’s had enough encounters with electricity for today so _no thanks_ – and pressing a clumsy hand to the panel to input his code.

He wobbles in, makes sure the door locks behind him, bangs his knee plates as he checks for bombs under his berth and desk, carefully examines the rest of the room, and, once he deems it clear, collapses on the berth with no ceremony.

Then he groans, folds back off, and sits on the floor. He clasps his hands together, bows his head, and sends up a prayer to the Dark God Primus, from whom all Cybertronian life sprang forth.

“Oh lord of shadows and mirrors,” he whispers out, knowing his voice is staticky, but having faith that his god will hear and understand regardless of his own shortcomings. “I call to you now, in thankfulness for your mercy, for your life-giving song. For your night and your stars, your depths and your darkness, which watch over and shelter us all. May the warmth of your Ember ever burn within mine. Forever and onwards, so it is decreed, and so it must be.”

Then he clambers back onto the berth, daily prayer said – and who could _not_ pray, when they follow the Prime? – and falls into welcome recharge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shattered Glass Optimus Prime is literally _evil_ and that is my entire characterisation of him. No higher purpose/cause/etc here, just pure unadulterated assholery. The Palpatine of Transformers. 
> 
> This universe bears no resemblance to what little SG canon we have and that is on purpose. SG Hot Rod is literally just a palette-swapped G1 Hot Rod, maybe a bit spiker around the edges, if you're trying to picture him. He has a flail - think the Witch King of Angmar from the LOTR films but more cyberpunk - but that is a Weapon Not Appearing In This Fic. Why does he have it, when such a weapon (as presented in LOTR) is pretty much unusable IRL? Rule of Cool.
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	25. Disorientation | IDW + G1 | Rodimus Prime + The Quintessons

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: background war and war aftermath, dimension travel, the Quintessons, implied/referenced slavery, non-consensual medical experimentation, head injury, deaths and violence by fire, Rodimus' concussion causing him to make references to common hentai tropes.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 25 : I Think I’ll Just Collapse Right Here, Thanks**

**Disorientation | Blurred Vision | Ringing Ears**

–

**IDW Rodimus Prime + G1 Quintessons**

–

It’s been a few centuries since the _Lost Light’s_ grand find-the-Knights-of-Cybertron adventure, and though they’re a galactic outreach vessel now, not free to just zip off when and where they please, the – shenanigans (Ultra Magnus’ term) – have never truly stopped. This is still pretty up there, though.

Rodimus is alone – not a good sign – and he’s surrounded by… _eggs._ Giant ones. With five faces. And tentacles.

“You know, I think I saw a hentai that started something like this,” he slurs out to the one closest to him, his helm aching like Megatron hit it with a bat the way he hit that small meteor back out into space three systems ago, saving the planet they’d been on. “But, like, I think the eggs thing came _after_ the tentacles…? I don’t remember. It was weird.”

“Silence,” one of the faces commands him. Rodimus isn’t feeling much like obeying – life-long authority issues and also these guys just kidnapped him so he’s not feeling all too respectful right now – but the way that a blaster is nudged hard into his back – it’s an unmistakeable sensation, that is, especially to someone who’s spent most of his life a soldier – makes him keep his mouth shut.

“Put him in the cells,” another five-faced floating egg says. “His build is not standard – perhaps the research team’s latest experiments have borne fruit after all. Ready him for scanning – I’ll send word to them.” They float off, tentacles trailing on the ground in a way that seems to suggest that they’re using them to pull themselves along, but surely such thin limbs are not strong enough to hold up the mass of the egg-like body, let alone the weight of five metal faces? So – floats. Rodimus is going to go with that.

The one near him switches faces, saying to some figures beyond Rodimus’ blurred vision, “Take him away.” It’s a mechanical face, but it’s attached to an organic body, and that’s – hm. Organics with cybernetic implants are hardly a strange sight, but a whole face? That’s not something Rodimus has seen before. And then it’s gone, leaving Rodimus alone with glowing bands around him that act like stasis-cuffs and people surrounding him that he can’t quite perceive through the pixelating visual feed and ringing audios.

_Concussion._ Rodimus grimaces to himself. It’s not fun to get one, and it’s not fun to be in what seems like a hostile situation with one affecting his ability to get away.

The figures surrounding him prod him down a corridor, steps heavy and clunking, metal on metal. Are these mecha? Rodimus squints at them, and, uh – _those are some massive fragging denta._ They look like Earthen sharks on tiny legs, only metal, ready to overbalance any nano-klik. Like someone took the Rodpod, gave it a horrendous paint job, bulbous optics, far too many razor sharp denta, and stuck it on legs better suited to a mech Tailgate’s size than roughly Rodimus’.

They’re all identical, too. Like M.T.O.s made by a maniac. Rodimus’ head is still spinning, his visual and audio feeds still unstable, and he doesn’t fancy trying to throw hands with even one of these guys, let alone a group of them. He’s brave, not stupid, no matter what people say.

He keeps his head down, lets them shove him into a cell – the glowing bands around him disappear the instant the door shuts and likely electrifies – and manually diverts power to his self-repair systems, sitting down on the floor and cutting off his ambulatory systems to save energy. He’s going to need every bit of help he can get to escape this one.

–

They leave him alone for what his chronometer tells him is thirty-seven hours. It doesn’t feel like it.

Rodimus’ head is still throbbing, though he’s both had a long but light recharge and has let his self-repair run its course. Careful investigation with his fingertips reveals a crack in his helm, deep enough to be concerning, and that would do it, Rodimus supposes. Self-repair won’t fix that kind of damage; he has to get to Ratchet or First Aid or, hell, even Megatron to get his processor back to how it should be.

Long experience with head wounds means that he’s not nearly as nauseous from the spinning and ringing world as he once would have been. He’s not quite sure if that’s something to be proud of, though. His sensory feeds are a little clearer than they were, now that he’s had time to adjust, but unless something really bad happens that necessitates an immediate escape, he’s not going to make an attempt. Better to sit in a normal cell and wait than fail and get upgraded to one harder for the hopefully-coming-soon rescue team to get into.

When his captors come back, as ugly as ever – and, _Primus,_ did he _really_ make that crack about hentai? Slag, he hopes they have no idea what hentai is, Mortilus have mercy on his spark – Rodimus lets them drag him out of his cell and down several corridors (which he memorises, obviously) and into a room with, of course, a medical berth with straps on it, an array of monitors, and the obligatory Evil Alien ScientistTM standing by. Why is his life one string of fiction tropes after another? It’s genuinely _ridiculous_ is what it is, whenever he has cause to take a step back and observe the last few centuries of his life.

“Let me guess,” Rodimus says, “you’re my host for this evening?”

The Evil Alien ScientistTM isn’t a floating egg _or_ a metal shark on tiny legs. They look like a mech, mostly, but they have numerous thorned tentacles coming out of the sockets where arms would go, and those look kind-of organic. Metallic outer shell to protect soft squishy insides? There are no few species who’ve chosen to go that way, though most don’t try to make their armour so… evil looking.

Those thorned tentacles gesture to the medical berth, and that, combined with the press of the blaster underneath his spoiler wings, makes Rodimus step forward and lie down reluctantly, the straps closing around him automatically and a light current running through them. It doesn’t hurt – not _yet –_ but it’s clearly there to remind Rodimus that he can be subdued at any time his host so pleases.

(Rodimus is not quite as bothered by this as he otherwise would be – his Outlier flames will burn him out if it comes to that. But – best not to tip his hand too soon.)

He is left alone with only the Evil Alien ScientistTM, no guards inside the room, which is arrogance if ever he’s seen it, but he’s not exactly going to argue for them to come back inside. The Evil Alien ScientistTM sets about scanning his frame, the monitors flickering to life, machines and lights moving over him, and in his admittedly glitchy peripheral vision Rodimus can see a schematic of his frame form on the screen. He can’t read the words, though something about the shape of the letters does put Old Cybertronian glyphs in mind. Still, another sign that he’s far from home: with all the intergalactic travelling he’s done, his language banks are very large.

“You wouldn’t happen to have an uncontrollable urge to monologue evilly at me, would you?” Rodimus asks after the silence, punctured only by the whirring and beeping of machines, stretches on for nearly twenty minutes. “I’d quite like to have an idea of your plan for me, you see.”

Evil Alien ScientistTM looks down at him, and, yep, those are organic eyes behind the coloured glass. Rodimus can even see the backwards text of a HUD displaying on the internal screen. “I see your kind are as foolish in your world as in this one,” they answer after a moment. “Such nonsense.”

“Oh, are we messing around with dimension travel, then?” Rodimus asks, faux-brightly. “I’ve a little experience in the area, I do admit.” More than he would honestly like, but yeah. Alternate dimensions, _again._ At least it would explain Rodimus' total unfamiliarity with a species that is speaking to him in one of the galactic standard languages. “Familiar with Cybertronians, then?”

“Familiar? Hah!” the Evil Alien ScientistTM chitters out a laugh. “They were good slaves once. Obedient. Versatile. Then they fought for freedom – but they were not made for freedom. They turned on each other and warred to the piteous few they are now. Give it time: they will bow once again.”

“Wow,” Rodimus says, mind racing, head aching. His species as the slaves of this race? And, oh _great,_ another war. “You know, I really don’t think I like you. Not good at the whole authority thing.”

_Not a fan of the slavery thing, either,_ Rodimus thinks.

“Your feelings in this matter are of no consequence,” the Evil Alien ScientistTM tells him. “You will serve, or you will die.” Then the Evil Alien ScientistTM turns to one side, picks up a tool, and raises it above Rodimus’ chest. With a curl of a tentacle, the plasma cutter flickers to life. “Open your chest armour, or it will _be_ opened,” they order. “I would see your core, to better take readings. It is different in structure than those of the native Cybertronians.”

“Uh, no thanks,” Rodimus says, before igniting the super-heated energon that runs in his lines, a _whoosh_ of white-hot flames spilling into the room as he sets himself and every surface he’s touching on fire. He can sit still and wait through a lot of things – but exposing his spark chamber? Not one of them.

The Evil Alien ScientistTM screams in pain, a horrible sizzling starting, like meat being cooked by the heated metal that now cages it, but Rodimus isn’t about to stop to subdue non-lethally a self-confessed slaver. Mercy is one of Rodimus’ core traits – just look at Megatron! – but there’s a time and a place, and right now is neither the time nor the place. Rodimus was a Wrecker, too. He knows how to do hard jobs.

He sits up, head still spinning, the bands and straps that held him down falling away, the medical berth melting under his heat. An alarm starts wailing as the flames spread – Rodimus’ flames can take metal as fuel, making them uniquely dangerous.

He lurches for the entrance, trying the panel – already melted, slag – before punching at the doors, breaking his fingers through, getting a grip, pulling the softening metal off in strips. The flames jump from him, eagerly igniting the scrap as he opens up a passage through, leaping out of the room to spread throughout the corridor.

Rodimus ducks out, a little after his fire, listening to the distant screams. They’re awful to hear: they bring to mind too many dirty missions, too many battlefields, too many gone to fire and flames and the heat of a smelter. He’s destroyed entire bases like this, entire ships and battalions. Once, even a city. He’s seen too much burn.

He stumbles his way down the corridor, bringing to mind the directions he memorised before. People run past him, running from the flames that he won’t burn in, and pay him no mind. Rodimus continues on, his head ringing with the screams of the dying and the creaking of the structure as his Outlier ability consumes it all, rendering it unstable.

He has to get outside. He’ll survive the heat, but he can still get buried, still get crushed. He follows in the footsteps of those escaping, and meets a cold night air with welcome.

The people here – slavers, their soldiers, maybe even their slaves – are evacuating in a hurry, zipping off in shuttles from the building that is glowing with heat, the smoke rising high into the sky, the light of the flames a beacon in the dark landscape. The shuttles fly away over the ground, leaving Rodimus alone.

Rodimus stumbles out, the light and the dark and the flickering shadows playing merry hell on his already glitched visual feed. He makes it some ways away – too disoriented to safely transform and drive – and ducks behind a metal out-building. He concentrates, stopping the pull from his spark, the rush that keeps his flames going; they will consume all the fuel they have access to before they die, now, and if this compound is isolated enough, the fire won’t spread farther.

Now all he has to do is find a way either off this planet or get a communication system capable of inter-dimensional signals up and running and he should be good. Primus. That’s not going to be easy.

“Hey, uh, you okay?” comes a voice, deep and – not quite wary, but definitely strange.

Rodimus turns, dialling his optics up. There’s a mech – several mecha, actually – each with blasters in their hands, standing to one side, having paused in their approach of him. They all have Autobot symbols on their chests. Heh, that’s a blast from the past: the ‘Bots are no longer an organisation in Rodimus’ universe, same as the ‘Cons, since keeping faction lines going while they are trying to build a peace for everyone is kind of completely antithesis to all their efforts.

The mech at the front is – familiar, in a way. Rodimus sees someone who looks an awful lot like him in the mirror.

“I suppose you’re my counterpart for this dimension?” he says. “Rodimus, is it?”

The other Rodimus – damn, he is _big –_ slowly nods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whenever I think about IDW and G1 bots encountering each other I have to restrain the urge to giggle. They just have so many differences between their universes. I mean, think of "Arcee and Galvatron are twins" and tell me that there wouldn't be some prime reactions there.
> 
> As is usual for me, the version of post-canon IDW that Rodimus is from is the one set up in my fic [Atonement](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25249054). I know that I use it a lot, but it's less that I'm constantly plugging my own fic and more that it's better for my health and enjoyment if I pretend that LL:25 happened this way instead of the canon way. Redemption arcs should not be made to mean _nothing_ and this is the hill I will die on. 
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	26. Blindness | IDW | Rodimus Prime + Thunderclash

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: major character injury, ship crash, isolation, concussion, blindness, implied/referenced terminal illness, ill-advised medical procedures on intimate parts of the anatomy, forced to trust, it's-not-sex-it's-to-save-your-life, maybe shades of fuck-or-die but it's not actually sex it's more like "this is an emergency medical procedure that you're getting a bit of pleasure from and both of us are awkward about it", as well as Thunderclash's big massive unrequited crush on Rodimus.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 26 : If You Thought The Head Trauma Was Bad…**

**~~Migraine~~ | Concussion | Blindness**

–

**IDW Rodimus Prime + Thunderclash**

–

There is no blissfully ignorant soft awakening from his stasis-lock. One moment, Rodimus is staring through the front view port of one of the _Lost Light’s_ sub-vessels – not his precious _Rodpod,_ thank Primus – at the corkscrewing world beyond, the monitors blaring alarms and flashing red with all the things that have gone wrong with the engines, and the next he is lurching up from a prone position on a flat surface, his systems still on high alert, his helm aching like a slag-sucker and his visual feed completely offline.

“Captain!” says a voice, familiar, and Rodimus’ combat programs cross-reference it to his memory banks and identify it as belonging to Thunderclash in the same instant that they pin the other mech down as _ally_ rather than _enemy._ With a total lack of any other energy signatures appearing on his scanners, his processor automatically cycles his weapons systems back to _standby_ instead of _active,_ a safety feature implemented through an upgrade some ways into the war after too many incidents of nightmare-caused friendly fire.

“Sit-rep,” Rodimus barks out, still-online combat programs and millions of years of military experience pretty much tearing the phrase from his vocaliser before even the thought of saying anything else crosses his brain module. He’s not a particularly formal, by-the-books officer – to Ultra Magnus’ continuous low-key frustration – but he _is_ an Autobot officer, and he _is_ capable of acting like it. Sometimes.

“The ship crashed,” Thunderclash starts, which – _obvious –_ but Rodimus lets him go on, “and it’s not repairable. I’ve recovered the emergency signal box from the wreckage – it is still intact, thankfully – but the comms were irretrievable and the ion clouds in this system are disrupting the limited range of our personal comms. Primus only knows if the emergency signal’s getting through. No hostiles on this planet – no sentient life at all, I believe – but the weather’s stayed calm. We’re in a small cave, and there’s not yet been a need for greater shelter.”

“Rations?” Rodimus groans as he sits up properly, shuffling to lean his back against the cave wall, feeling the rock beneath his hands, against his spoiler wings. He tries to look at Thunderclash, but. Nothing. His visual feed is entirely offline, and by the big fat red reading in his HUD, will remain that way until Ratchet or First Aid get their hands on him. _Blind. Great._

“What’s in our subspaces,” Thunderclash answers apologetically. “I’ve done some preliminary investigations of the surrounding area, and my scans indicate that there might be fuel that is energon-convertable to the south-south-east, but I didn’t want to move you and exacerbate your head trauma before it became necessary.” Standard emergency rations should last for ten days, if one isn’t being an _idiot_ about energy conservation.

(The war has not left much room for such idiots. Most of them are dead by now.)

Rodimus grimaces, hands reaching up to his aching helm, his fingers gently prodding the dents in it and the massive crack running up from the lip where his helm meets his face plates and extending back to nearly past his left audio. It’s not wide, thankfully, but it’s clearly deep enough to have knocked him offline for… “How long have I been in stasis?” Rodimus asks.

“Twenty-eight hours,” Thunderclash says. “Well. Twenty-eight hours and fourteen minutes. I set a timer in my HUD.”

Rodimus’ grimace deepens, but as far as involuntary forced stasis-locks go, it’s not too bad. Very good, actually. Rodimus has heard tales of mecha waking up centuries after their offlining, alone on empty battlefields. Pit, just take a look at poor Tailgate! Guy was under for six million years. In comparison to _that,_ twenty-eight hours and fourteen minutes is like a single optic-shutter.

“Could be worse,” he grumps. He tries to look directly at Thunderclash, but he knows he’s not quite managing it by the sound of Thunderclash shifting. “Now, are my optics lit up? I’ve got no visual feed.”

“Yes,” Thunderclash says, softer, worried, “but they’re of different brightness settings and the inner lenses are shifting. Is that involuntary?”

“I’m not doing it,” Rodimus confirms, sighing. He tilts his head back, clunking it _very_ gently against the rocky wall behind, letting his weight rest there. His neck aches, his head aches, and it feels like his own weight is too much to carry. He hasn’t even gotten up yet. Still, he tries to shoot Thunderclash a sharp look, hoping that the line of his mouth will make his intentions clear even if his optics are not quite up to the task. “Your spark’s life support system,” he says, low and serious, because frag everyone who says otherwise, he is _not_ a negligent captain, “where is it?”

“Destroyed along with the rest of the ship,” Thunderclash answers, his voice stiff and blank.

“Great,” Rodimus says. “That’s just slaggin’ _great.”_

–

Rodimus’ head injury doesn’t get any better, the way they were hoping it might.

The two of them stay some hours longer in the cave. Thunderclash says it’s the planet’s night cycle outside, and Rodimus can’t tell the difference visually but it _does_ seem a little warmer when Thunderclash finally helps him out and down the small incline. Rodimus hadn’t been cold, though he’d heard the clamp of Thunderclash’s armour plates sealing to hold more heat inside: he runs hot, hotter than most.

He also hates that he’s reliant on fragging _Thunderclash_ to get around, but his visual feed is offline, his scanners are playing up, and his helm will. Not. Stop. _Aching._

Rodimus doesn’t say it, but by the way Thunderclash reaches out to steady him, he doesn’t need to. He’s dizzy with pain, his stabilisers probably damaged, and there’s a faint ringing in his audios. He thinks that his left one isn’t processing nearly as well as his right one.

So. Here they are. Thunderclash – slagging Greatest Autobot That Ever Lived Thunderclash – What A Guy Thunderclash – is _holding his hand,_ and _leading him around by it._ No matter that it’s their best option right now, this is not what Rodimus wants. At all.

It’s _humiliating._ Rodimus is _humiliated._ And to make matters worse, Thunderclash doesn’t seem to be bothered in the slightest! He’s _in mortal danger,_ and he’s _happy!_ There’s limited rations, no communications, and his Primus-damned _life support system_ is gone, and still the guy is chattering away like he’s on holiday! The life support system that he needs to, y’know, _support his life!_

It’s a worry, because – because Rodimus isn’t _cruel._ Thunderclash’s very existence may irritate him to the Pit and back, but he doesn’t want the other guy to just – drop down dead or something. If nothing else, sharing space with his corpse would really put a downer on Rodimus’ day. Days with no corpses are good days by definition. For some that might be a rather low bar, but Rodimus is a soldier – he knows how to take what he can get and be thankful he got anything at all.

The two of them – Thunderclash leading, of course – make their way over the rocky ground. The planet, according to Thunderclash, is mostly rock, with some sparse flora scattered about amongst the crags, with shallow caves, like the one they took refuge in, numerous.

There’s ore in thin veins in some of the caves – not pure energon crystals, but something very kerogen-heavy. Rodimus curls his lip in silent disgust at Thunderclash's report: petroleum forms from kerogen and, just – _ugh._ Whatever comes out of the other end of their small converter will be, in theory, processable, but…

“Primus,” Rodimus says, “thought I’d gotten free of petroleum-based energon after I left Earth.”

“Sorry,” Thunderclash apologises, as though it’s something he could have controlled. “I know it’ll taste terrible.”

Rodimus clicks his glossa. “Don’t apologise for slag that ain’t your fault,” he snaps. Thunderclash’s apologetic nice-guy martyr-complex really gets on his nerves.

(He steadfastly ignores a voice that sounds a bit like Drift that chides him for his own occasional martyr tendencies. At least he doesn’t go out of his way to perform them! Self-sacrifice is _cheap,_ but if it has to be someone, then as captain and Prime, it has to be _him._

The humans have it right: the captain goes down with their ship. His crew is his first priority, Rodimus believes that one hundred per cent.)

When it appears like Thunderclash is about to apologise again, Rodimus speaks before he can: “Let’s just keep going.”

–

On the third day, Thunderclash falls to his knees, dragging Rodimus down with him, doubled over and gasping through his vents, EM field emitting waves of pain.

Rodimus suppresses the urge to panic – there’s nothing much that panic will do other than make a situation worse – with all the discipline of millions of years spent in situations where panic was both the first natural response and the one that would do the most harm. “Thunderclash,” he says, modulating his EM field to project steady calm, “can you hear me?”

Shakily, Thunderclash nods, Rodimus feeling the movement through the air, by the way Thunderclash’s shoulders shift. “Y-yes, ca-captai-in.”

Rodimus doesn’t need to ask what the problem is – it’s Thunderclash’s damaged spark – so instead he just says, “Open up your chest plates.”

“Ca-pp-tian,” Thunderclash protests, seeing immediately the only plan of action left to them that isn’t _wait and hope Thunderclash survives on his own_. “Ris-sky. Th-aat’s _risskyy.”_

“I know that,” Rodimus says shortly. “But I have a Matrix-imbued spark, remember? Less risky for me.”

Thunderclash’s vocaliser audibly shorts out in a bark of static. After a moment, Rodimus can hear the shift of a minor transformation as Thunderclash obeys him and his chest plates split apart and slide away, revealing what would be an intimate sight if Rodimus could see it. Thunderclash is undoubtedly feeling exposed either way, though.

_The crew comes first, always,_ Rodimus reminds himself as he pushes Thunderclash down on his back, crawling up, awkward and blind, into his lap. “You’re gonna have to help me get situated,” he warns.

Thunderclash nods, Rodimus can feel it, and shifts his grip onto Rodimus’ hips. That’s – Rodimus shoves the instinctual programs away, locking them, ensuring they don’t online. This is not a spark merge, this is not interface, this is not an intimate act. This is a _medical procedure,_ and an ill-advised one at that.

Theoretically, the pulse of a strong spark – in the eightieth percentile and above for its frequency reading – can be used to stabilise weakening and faltering sparks by donating some of its energy. Hot Rod’s spark frequency had been in the eightieth percentile, and after the Matrix had its way with him, Rodimus’ jumped up into the ninetieth percentile. The stronger the spark, the less risk for the donator, though the act always carries inherent risk. Sparks are tricky things.

Spark-based interface is supposed to be the most intimate, the most pleasurable. But Rodimus will be pulsing out, and Thunderclash definitely won’t be, negating any possible feedback loop. In fact, their spark chambers will be staying firmly _shut,_ so this will be about the raw energy only, not the data and intimacy one can find in a true merge.

Rodimus slides open his own chest plates, pushing down the urge to cover them up again. It’s not – it’s _not_ interface, he firmly reminds himself again. He’s never merged because that takes the kind of deep trust that he just hasn’t had yet in any relationship. He’s not even thought about – _really_ thought about it – with _Drift,_ let alone fragging _Thunderclash!_

But this is a matter of life and death, and _the crew comes first._

Thunderclash pulls him up with care, despite his trembling limbs, positioning Rodimus’ chest to hover over his own. Perhaps it’s for the best that Rodimus is blind and in pain and his head won’t stop hurting long enough for him to _really_ second-guess. He doesn’t want to see what expression is on Thunderclash’s face as he reveals his most private components.

He shivers in place and then lets his weight down, feeling the waning strength of Thunderclash’s EM field, the faltering of the spark it originates from. Thunderclash’s chest is large, and his own is practically half _inside –_ he’s not going to think about that – before his spark chamber is clacking against Thunderclash’s own, and the sudden vibration of energy threatens to short-circuit his limbs.

Thunderclash holds him steady, holds him close, a large hand on his back, up and between his spoiler wings. Rodimus refuses to think of it as comforting, but there’s something – acceptable – about the support.

The spark beneath him is flickering, emanating pain, and Rodimus gathers up some of his own spark energy, knowing that as he does so the glyphs inscribed by the Matrix across his spark chamber light up, and sends out a tentative pulse. Thunderclash’s spark drags it in, there’s no other way to explain it, sucking up the energy it so desperately needs, the energy it can no longer reliably hold stable on its own, Thunderclash’s very essence slowly dispersing without aid.

Rodimus repeats, ignoring with single-minded focus Thunderclash’s low staticky groan. The big guy’s getting a lot more out of this than Rodimus is, and Primus knows that if they manage to stabilise Thunderclash then the next few however-long will be awkward as hell, but – there will _be_ a however-long, which is really the most important thing here.

Thunderclash’s other hand raises up to cup the back of Rodimus’ head, careful of the crack, and Rodimus sends out another pulse, this one stronger, focusing on the strength of Thunderclash’s spark and not the embarrassed, mortified pleasure he can feel beginning to hum through his crew-mate’s EM field, juxtaposed with the pain still there. There’s a reason this is done while the patient is in stasis-lock, but they don’t have that luxury.

“Captain…” Thunderclash whispers, his vocaliser already steadier than before.

“Tell me when,” Rodimus answers stiffly, knowing that Thunderclash has an array of monitors hooked up to his spark chamber that have readings in his HUD. He thinks he can even feel them, lumps and bumps beneath his own, but he’s _not_ putting his fingers in to look.

Thunderclash nods. Rodimus goes back to stabilising him.

_The_ _ **Lost Light,**_ Rodimus thinks to himself, _had better get here soon._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This memory might feature in Thunderclash's guilty fantasies for centuries to come. Guilty because while Rodimus is consenting, it's not interface, it's literally a _I'm trying to save your life and we both know you're getting a bit of pleasure out of this but also this is incredibly awkward for both of us so we're gonna ignore that_ medical procedure. I assume it will be very different in the fantasies. 
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	27. Extreme Weather | IDW | Drift + Gasket

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: background dystopic society, background discrimination, homelessness, reference to deaths via pollution, referenced blood drinking (the robot equivalent of), implied/referenced state-endorsed violence, extreme weather (acid rain), referenced drug use, character with heavily-implied depression.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 27 : Okay, Who Had Natural Disasters On Their 2020 Bingo Card?**

**~~Earthquake~~ | Extreme Weather | Power Outage**

–

**IDW Drift + Gasket**

–

In Cybertron’s cold months, when it’s at the farthest point of its orbit, vicious storms gather on the Titanium Plateaus and drift down over Tarn and Rodion, spitting lightning and acid rain with all the vicious apathy of nature. The winds howl through the streets and no sane mech with any other options would be outside – it’s not just uncomfortable, not just dangerous, but actually _fatal,_ if one is unlucky enough to get caught out at the wrong time with no shelter near enough to be found before Cybertron’s weather claims another poor spark.

Drift supposes that he could be considered _a poor_ _spark_ _._

He spends his winters holed up in whatever shelter he can find. The squat homes in Upper Rodion may not be built very well, but they have a roof and walls and keep out the acid rain, though Primus knows they’re colder than would be considered acceptable were the residents not the caste they are. Down in the Dead End, Drift doesn’t even have their meagre shelter.

The drains on the upper layers drip down below, gurgling from the rusted roofs in a manner not entirely unlike the last gasping vents of a dying mech, and the Dead End floods with pools that can _kill_ if one is unlucky enough to get the acid-laced liquid into the wrong part of their internals. These pools, the dripping from above, the crevices the winds howl through, and the bitter, _bitter_ cold… no, Drift cannot say that he enjoys the cold months. There’s a reason that, in lieu of having consistent access to the standard Cybertronian calendar, the Dead Enders count their lives by how many winters they’ve survived.

Drift’s survived three-hundred-thousand, seven-hundred and eighty-one winters. He’s not quite sure that he’ll survive his next one.

A roof collapse has forced he and Gasket to abandon their latest squat, the old storage shed attached to the back of one of the defunct factories now completely unusable. It has never been Drift’s favourite hovel, but the left-over shelves had made good barricades against the biting winds once he and Gasket had moved them around a bit, and though the left-over chemicals straining the walls sometimes had his vents spluttering and wheezing as he came up from recharge, and the strange smell had never quite gone away, it had been _something_ to help them through the winter.

Now he and Gasket are braving the wind that’s howling through the tunnels, the strip lights above and around flickering too much, even when accounting for their normal unreliability. “Power station musta took some damage,” Gasket says, eyeing them. “They’ll make sure above has power, though.” Unsaid is the fact that below, in the Dead End, where all the mecha that no one wants are, darkness might reign for weeks or months before they get around to fixing it. For a given value of _fixing._

Drift’s had dark winters before. They’re… not fun.

Drift’s armour plating clamps down to his protoform as much as it can, sealing shut with a hiss, and he can hear Gasket’s do the same. Unfortunately, lack of maintenance – none of which is Drift’s fault! – has ensured that the sealing lining under his armour plates is – not in great shape, to say the least. It’s better than _nothing,_ but the cold still seeps in like creeping fingers, and the wind is harsh enough to catch and pry at the seams that aren’t quite smooth against the protoform beneath.

“Where should we go?” Drift asks, denta chattering as his frame vibrates slightly in place, heating systems trying to get him back up to a more optimal temperature by use of kinetic energy and friction. His already low fuel tanks are draining faster than he would like as his systems guzzle the energy to try and warm him up.

Gasket hums as he thinks, ducking into a narrow crooked alley between two hovels, both with collapsed roofs and therefore unusable, Drift following. In here, there’s a little bit of shelter from the wind, but the constant drip above and the puddle gathering in the middle demonstrates why no one’s turned this alley into a shelter yet. Drift and Gasket carefully avoid the puddle – though they can do nothing about the searing drips that bite into the upper layer of their armour – and walk through, pausing in a small space where the drips don’t fall and the alley walls haven’t yet opened up to the street beyond.

“Maybe the foundries?” Gasket suggests, without much enthusiasm.

Drift winces. True, the foundries will be a hell of a lot _warmer,_ but – they’re an enforcer hot zone, no pun intended, as the Senate’s little minions guard the district diligently against any who would dare think to steal the products made there. A huge part of Drift is certain that they’re as much to keep the foundry workers _in_ the walled prison-like compound that the district publicly says it isn’t as they are to keep other mecha _out._

“Crux used t’be a foundry mech,” Drift points out, referring to another mech they know, that they’ve shared squats with before, “an’ he said he would rather drown in acid than ever go back there.”

Gasket grimaces. “You’re right. He did say that.” He clenches his hands together, his finger joints creaking and clicking too much to be healthy, and says, “You got another idea?”

Drift shrugs. “No better than you,” he answers. “Outta the overhanging layers is more exposed, more mecha, but – might be able to beg a share.”

Gasket nods. “Worth a shot,” he says.

–

An outsider would perhaps find it strange that the districts outside of the overhanging upper layers – all of below is the Dead End, but the Dead End is bigger than most would think – would have more shelter, but it’s true.

Underneath, in the tunnels, the constant drip from above and the cracks and ruins make them liable to flood and collapse. Outside, when one takes the brief opportunities between the outbursts from the smog filled sky, the buildings and hovels are more likely to be in semi-functional (never decent) repair, as the act of repairing them isn’t as much of a gamble when it comes to compromising the structural integrity of the entire surroundings.

Drift and Gasket linger on the edge of the upper layer for hours until they see a break in the dark clouds – nearly indistinguishable from the pollution of the factories, and only a keen and native optic would be able to spot the difference – large enough to give them the time they need to find some sort of shelter.

They transform and drive the distance. Gasket’s engine is rattling in a concerning way, the same as it’s been for a good couple decades now, and Drift’s tyres need desperate replacement, but they zip through – there are no enforced speed limits down here, road accidents are _welcome_ if they kill off the residents faster, no matter that it’s never said out loud – in good time.

They try poking around for their own space first, armour plates clattering in the cold. The air is damp, traces of acid lingering, making ventilations painful, but that’s nothing they’re not used to, and they don’t let it slow their search down. Dirty faces and suspicious optics meet them at every turn, but some are familiar, and no tension manages to erupt into violence.

_Scarcity of resources,_ Gasket had told Drift many thousands of years ago, _an’ the enforcers breakin’ up larger gatherings means that no one bands together the way they should. State-enforced localised war for survival. All o’ the Dead End’s a battleground, Drift, an’ **don’t forget it.**_

Drift has never forgotten. Day to day life won’t let him.

Still, Gasket and Drift have no desire to share a hovel with mecha they need to keep one optic on at all times. Life is stressful enough: Drift doesn’t need to fear for his spark being extinguished in his recharge on top of the bitter stretching cold of winter.

Drift isn’t a siphonist, and neither is Gasket, but – they exist, down here. Mecha who would slit your lines and drain you dry for every last drop of energon you possess, their hunger is so great, their morals so loose. And Drift has drunk energon from lines before – no sense in wasting resources if you happen to stumble across a deactivated corpse before someone else does or the enforcers take it away – and has even partaken in the ceremonial bloodletting when he and Gasket solidified their relationship to each other, each nicking a line and drinking enough for a sip, to prove that they trusted each other with _everything –_ but he’s not a _siphonist,_ and he has no desire to share a space with one _._

“Come on,” Gasket mutters, looking up at the sky and the gathering clouds, “there’s gotta be somewhere.”

There isn’t, though.

Drift and Gasket walk around some more, before the picking up of the wind signals that their time is running out swiftly. They end up squishing themselves into a gap between two buildings, not wide enough to be called an alley, with a piece of corrugated sheet metal liberated from a pile of scrap and shoved in above them, the sides squealing roughly on their audios as they force it in. It’s not perfect, not by a long shot, but it should keep out the worst of the acid rain, and the depth of the alley will keep them out of the wind.

Drift settles down on the ground, back to the dead end wall, unminding of the filth on the floor. Heh, a dead end in the Dead End. Primus, that’s an unfunny joke.

Gasket pulls another piece of sheet metal – this one not nearly so large – and props it up to half-block the entrance in. Their tiny make-shift shelter goes dark, their optics the brightest things around, their bio-lights dim with lack of fuel. Then he comes to sit next to Drift, the two of them curling up together, trying to share warmth. The dirt doesn’t bother Gasket, either.

Drift shivers, entwining his arm with Gasket’s, and watches morosely as the fuel reading in his HUD ticks down faster than he’d like. He’s so cold. His frame is shutting down external systems, his pedes and hands going numb as the joints lock up and gears still. He could force them to online again, sure, but… what’s the point? He’s not going anywhere, and the lack of them drawing precious energon away from his vital systems is necessary right now.

“We’ll go huntin’ again tomorrow,” Gasket murmurs to him through a hoarse vocaliser. Drift’s own is already offline to save energy. “Find another place.”

Drift looks up at the dark sheet metal above, the grooves of its corrugation catching and holding shadows, and doesn’t mutter back, _I_ _f the rain lets up._ Gasket already knows that, just like he knows that more fuel will soon become a worry, since they’re using up their reserves faster what with their frames trying to compensate for the inadequate shelter.

He just nods instead, letting Gasket make his plans. Gasket likes making plans, even if life usually throws too many obstacles in their way for many to come into any kind of fruition. It’s a comfort thing, Drift has come to understand through many millennia of acquaintance: setting small and achievable goals gets Gasket through life.

Drift’s not like that. He doesn’t have the optimism. Mecha like them, down here in the literal gutters, pulling their way out of thick chemical residue and acid-laced rain just to get moving in the morning? They have no future beyond immediate survival. Everything – _everything –_ is stacked so highly against them, no light piercing through the walls and the ceiling and the cage bars the Functionists have built to box them in.

Drift doesn’t make plans. Those things are useless, fantastical whimsies. Why bother when he can get something _more real_ with a syk hit? What’s the _point?_ Drift shivers, curls closer into Gasket’s side. _There is no point._

Above, pattering on their sorry roof, the acid rain continues to fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who's the other minor character in Drift's backstory that we should have gotten more of? If you guessed Gasket you're right! Seriously, IDW, both Wing _and_ Gasket? Do we _ever_ get to see someone who was important to pre-MTMTE Drift _without_ them dying with barely any content?
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	28. Accidents | G1 | Hot Rod + Daniel Witwicky

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: background war, gun violence against a minor, failed assassination attempt, vehicular crash, discrimination, xenophobia.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 28 : Such Wow. Many Normal. Very Oops.**

**Accidents | Hunting Season | ~~Mugged~~**

–

**G1 Hot Rod + Daniel Witwicky**

–

“Hey, Hot Rod,” Carly says, stepping out of her side alley with an apologetic look on her face. The brisk morning air is chilly, but it’s nearing the middle of spring, and already Daniel is insisting on wearing shorts outside as the temperatures begin to rise again after winter.

Her son’s Autobot guardian rumbles his engine, his headlights flicking on and then off again. Hot Rod’s in his alt mode, parked on the street behind their house. Their back garden’s fence doesn’t pose much of an obstacle to Daniel, when he sits outside by the shed and talks to Hot Rod out on the street. It’s too attention-grabbing for Hot Rod to park out front, and more so for him to be in his root mode, but Carly likes that Daniel always has a friend close at hand, even if he is forced to speak with him through a plywood fence to at least _try_ and keep the paparazzi away.

“Carly? Good morning,” Hot Rod says, and Carly knows that she probably woke him from a doze. She feels a grimace of sympathy fly across her face: Hot Rod and Bumblebee both spend a lot of their time with her family, but only Hot Rod is officially assigned to them. Being on guard for any potential Decepticon threats to the Autobot-allied humans, negotiating relations with too-nosy reporters as well as any other human who’s looking a bit too interested in them, completing whatever tasks he gets given by his own superiors, and doing all of that whilst also keeping up with the energy of a ten year old boy… it must be an exhausting juggle, and Carly knows Hot Rod doesn’t get as much rest as he really needs.

She’d ask Optimus to assign another, but – Autobot City is less than two years away from completion, and that’s _nothing_ in terms of just how big the project is, as well as the stress of keeping its exact details secret. It’s all hands on deck for the Autobots – the Prime really _doesn’t_ have anyone else to spare. She feels guilty for having disturbed what rest Hot Rod gets, but she doesn’t have another option at the moment.

“Good morning,” she replies, “and I’m sorry to bother you, Roddy, but my car has broken down and I’ve got a meeting with Commander Faireborn I have to get to. I can take the bus, but I have to leave right away. Could you get Daniel to school? I’m sorry to trouble you with this.”

“Yeah, I can do that,” Hot Rod says, heightening and then lowering on his suspension, in a move that Carly has long since figured out is an alt mode stretch. “Drop him off by Jackson Road, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Carly smiles. “Away from the crowds. I know that Danny likes to show off his Autobot friends, but he needs to learn that you’re not objects for him to win at show-and-tell with. Jackson Road and then he can walk around the corner by himself – don’t let him convince you to brave the morning crowd. Those parents don’t need any more gossip to fuel them.”

Hot Rod laughs lightly. “He’s young yet,” he says. Carly knows that Hot Rod’s young, too, it’s part of why he gets along with Daniel so well. But Cybertronians don’t have a juvenile stage in the same way that humans do: Hot Rod was built an adult, if an inexperienced one. “But I will. No offence, but I don’t need all those hands on my plating either.”

“Understandable,” Carly says. She’s not sure she would take people touching her like they had a right to with nearly the aplomb that Hot Rod does. Truly, Optimus chose well when assigning an Autobot to her family permanently. “Let me go tell Danny the change of plans. Have a good day, Roddy.”

“You, too,” Hot Rod says as Carly turns around to walk back into her house. “Hope your meeting goes well.”

“Thanks!”

–

Daniel slings himself into Hot Rod’s front passenger seat with all the enthusiasm of a ten-year-old boy who’s just found out that he’s about to travel with his alien robot best friend.

“You know we’re going to school, right?” Hot Rod laughs as Daniel drops his bag into his back seat and fumbles with the seatbelt. Hot Rod could do that for him, but Carly and Spike have asked him not to – Daniel needs to have putting his seatbelt on engrained in his muscle memory. The cars he travels in are not always Autobots, after all.

“Yeah, yeah,” Daniel says. “But I’m going with _you.”_

“You’re getting out on Jackson Road as usual,” Hot Rod reminds him.

“I know,” Daniel says, clicking in the seatbelt and shifting to get comfortable in the chair, “but I get to spend more time with you, yeah? And you’re picking me up?”

“Uh, probably?” Hot Rod says. Carly hadn’t said that, though she’d looked a bit frazzled at the sudden change of plans, but if she’s in a meeting then she’s not getting her car repaired, is she? Spike’s away at the Autobot City building site, so that leaves Hot Rod to ferry Daniel back and forth. “I’ll give her a call at lunchtime and ask, but it’s likely.”

“Yes!” Daniel says victoriously. Hot Rod laughs in agreeing enthusiasm, his disturbed recharge falling away from his mind. It’s not like he has to wait outside the school all day, is it? He can come back to get in those hours he needs.

–

They don’t make it to Daniel’s school.

Hot Rod and Daniel are stopping at a red light in a four-way intersection, the traffic on their right flowing out, waiting for their turn next.

Hot Rod hears a sudden roar of metal, the sound of sudden gasps and screams, and then a huge eighteen-wheeler from directly opposite is ploughing through the gathered vehicles at a speed nearly twice the limit. He initiates the air bag to burst out of his dash with no warning, cushioning Daniel, before he braces himself. At the speed the truck’s going, there’s no time to get out of the way, no time to transform.

There’s a driver – red in the face – behind the wheel, and by the way he’s acting, the large vehicle is apparently completely out of his control.

The truck still manages to unerringly smash straight into them, though.

–

Hot Rod’s awake fast – combat programs won’t allow him to stay down for long – and before he’s even read his HUD to ascertain his own damage, he’s initiating a scan of Daniel with the sensors he got from Ratchet when he was first assigned this guardianship, the ones that are better suited for detailing organic health, calibrated specifically for humans.

He hadn’t been on Earth long then, and he remembers his first sight of Daniel, then a toddler, excited to meet another gentle metal giant, raised unafraid of the Autobots. Daniel whines now when Hot Rod reminisces on his younger years, but the Autobot was Daniel’s first friend. First and best.

Daniel is, to Hot Rod’s horror, unconscious. The air bag certainly helped, but there’s blood trickling from a small cut on his head and he’s slumped forward in the seatbelt, eyes shut, breathing thankfully steady. Hot Rod runs a deeper scan – Daniel isn’t awake to complain about how it tickles – and finds, to his immense relief, that there is no bleeding inside Daniel’s brain. Unconscious, and he’ll have a headache later, but he’ll live and be fine.

From there, Hot Rod turns his attention outwards. His own frame is aching, his sensor-nets sparking with pain, and his front is partially crushed, his wind-shield cracked but not broken. Cybertronian frames can take a lot of abuse, but they are not insusceptible to damage, even by human means. Hot Rod’s hurt, but he’s been hurt worse in battles, and these are not crippling injuries to an Autobot warrior of his experience. His emergency beacon is transmitting: it got altered to activate under different criteria after he took the guardianship position. Hopefully some back up will be here soon.

Out in the road, there is crying and screaming. Humans dash about and there’s – blood. And scraps of metal and debris scattered about. Already, Hot Rod can hear sirens as emergency vehicles home in on the scene. The eighteen-wheeler is smashed into a building, and Hot Rod’s in between the building and it, the momentum carrying him along but his armour’s constitution causing the engine of the truck to fail and die as its own front was smashed in far worse than Hot Rod’s.

The driver of the truck clambers out, dropping awkwardly to the road as the chattering converges. He’s clearly got a broken _something,_ blood on his face, one arm held awkwardly to his side, staggering on his feet, but –

But he also has a gun.

“Oi,” he gasps out, eyes pinned to Hot Rod. “You. You’re one o’ those _fucking_ _ **aliens,**_ aren’t ya?”

Hot Rod doesn’t answer – his Autobot symbol, no matter how dented, should make the answer clear enough – and instead decides that it’s in his and Daniel’s best interest that he get out of the position he’s stuck in. He wiggles on his suspension, engages his very-not-right engine to rattle alive, and turns his tyres about, trying to extricate himself from the tight space between the smashed truck and the cracked wall.

The man is blocking the way. Hot Rod eyes the raised gun, the voices around the edges that are pointing it out, how fast people around are retreating away at the sight of the weapon.

“Please step aside,” Hot Rod says. “I don’t want to accidently run you over.”

“Fuckin’ alien,” the man mutters. “I’ll show you _accident._ Tch!” The man peers into the wind-shield, eyeing the inflated air bag. “Issat kid still alive?” he asks.

Hot Rod hesitates to answer. The man sneers.

“Figures,” he says, gesturing wildly with the gun. That calibre of bullet won’t pierce Hot Rod’s armour, but his already-cracked wind-shield might be another story. “This _would_ be the day one o’ you _robots_ takes the kid to school.”

The last puzzle piece snaps into place for Hot Rod.

“Ah,” he says, and now he’s _angry._ “This little accident wouldn’t happen to be not-so-accidental, would it?”

“Kid’s family needs a message,” the man says, and now he’s aiming the gun directly at the wind-shield, right at Daniel’s unconscious body. “You lot ain’t welcome here, an’ they’re part o’ the problem.”

“They’re your kind,” Hot Rod says, priming his engine.

“So?” the man says. “Your kind have been warring since before humans were even a thing.” True, but not something Hot Rod particularly likes to dwell on. “An’ now you’ve dragged us into this.”

“That was never our intention,” Hot Rod says. He checks his HUD: his engine systems are strained, but they won’t fail on him.

“What does _intention_ matter?” the man says. Hot Rod can see police cars close in around them, and on his HUD he can see Prowl’s spark-signature appear on his radar, hidden amongst them. He immediately opens a channel between them, audio only, letting Prowl hear what Hot Rod’s hearing. “You prey on our resources like vultures, the lot o’ ya. An’ I’m _sick_ o’ it.”

Hot Rod doesn’t reply – it’s clear that there’s nothing to be said that won’t incense the man. Unfortunately, it seems that silence angers him, too.

“I’m talkin’ to you, robot!” the man snarls. “I’ll tell you what: it’s fucking _hunting season_ for you scrap-heaps, an’ any who associate with ya!”

The man’s finger twitches, and Hot Rod guns his engine, moving a precisely calculated number of feet forward. The man gets knocked down, laid partially under Hot Rod’s smashed front, the gun firing off into the air, the bullet smashing into the brick of a building in a shower of dust.

Prowl lurches forward immediately, transforming and coming to stand beside Hot Rod, his shadow looming over the man. “Any other weapons?”

“None on my scanners,” Hot Rod says. “Is First Aid far? Daniel’s hurt.”

“About a mile out,” Prowl answers. “The Protectobots were on the other side of the city, but they set out as soon as your emergency beacon started transmitting. Is it bad?”

“No,” Hot Rod replies, “he’ll be fine. I just – want to get him away before he wakes up and sees this.” The human police are swarming now, securing the cursing and swearing man.

“Understood. Do you need help getting back to base?” Prowl asks. “An attack like this means we must relocate the Witwicky family unit immediately.”

Hot Rod examines his HUD again. “Think I might have to get a lift,” he admits. “Engine’s not great.”

Prowl eyes his wounds. “You are in pain,” he says, his voice what passes for Prowl’s version of _concerned_. “I have dampening chips.”

“It’s fine, sir,” Hot Rod says. “I’ve had worse.”

Prowl narrows his optics. “Foolish pride does a warrior no favours,” he says.

Hot Rod actually startles in place, rocking a bit on his axles. “What? No! I meant – I really have worked and fought through worse. We – didn’t exactly have the medical supplies to spare up there. Pain dampening chips were for when someone _really_ needed them.”

Prowl inclines his head. “My apologies,” he murmurs. “I forget sometimes that the Cybertron teams lasted for millions of years under harsher circumstances than we left. I did not mean to offend.”

“Uh, it’s fine, sir,” Hot Rod stumbles out. “I just want to get Daniel somewhere safe. And someone needs to call Carly – she’s in a meeting, or is on her way to one.”

“I will get Blaster on it,” Prowl nods, turning away, visibly – to a Cybertronian anyway – opening up a comm to someone.

Hot Rod sighs and settles back down, his frame aching in pain, Daniel still unconscious in his seat and staining his interiors with tiny drops of blood, the cut already clotting on his head.

He loves Earth, he really does. It’s a home in the way that Cybertron has never truly been. He just wishes that more of Earth would love them back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I refuse to believe that there wasn't large groups of humans that _hated_ the Cybertronians in G1. Of course, there were also large groups that loved them, so it balances out somehow. And the Witwicky family? Prime targets. 
> 
> Also, a four million year separation is more than enough time for the Cybertron-stationed Autobots to have developed an entirely different micro-culture than the Earth Autobots, and methinks that there was a bit of culture clash that no one was really expecting when communications were re-established.
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	29. Emergency Room | IDW | Rung

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: implied/referenced memory alteration, referenced deaths, background war and war aftermath, character injury, use of a syringe for anyone who hates reading about needles, religious themes, referenced religion being used as a tool for control/oppression, referenced Functionists in all their shitty glory, implied survivor's guilt, and almost unbearable amounts of dramatic irony.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 29 : I Think I Need A Doctor**

**~~Intubation~~ | Emergency Room | Reluctant Bed Rest**

–

**IDW Rung**

–

Rung has strange luck.

He’s known this for millennia: by some weird twist of – fate, chance, fortune, coincidence, whatever one wants to call it – he consistently walks away from incidents that kill numerous others. Ships have crashed with him the sole survivor, buildings collapsed with him the only one pulled out alive from the rubble, accidents and incidents and all manner of plate-raising danger has been inflicted upon him, and every time – _every time –_ he’s the one that walks away.

_Mortilus must love you,_ one of his more religious co-workers once told him, a mech who works on a distant outpost now and wouldn’t recognise Rung if Rung stood before him. _Or maybe he hates you? You never end up in his arms, anyway._

Rung isn’t particularly religious – looking up at effigies and reliefs in temples of the Guiding Hand just inflicts on him a sense of… discontinuity, maybe? Unease? A sense that something’s gone terribly _wrong,_ anyhow – but with every incident that piles up, every time the statistics and calculated probability chances stack ever higher against him, he comes to wonder whether he is somehow _cursed._

No one sees him. No one remembers him. What if he can’t get into the Afterspark when he should because Mortilus or Primus or both have totally forgotten him? Can he not _die properly,_ with the only option left simply being to _carry on?_

(He tries not to dwell on this idea too much. Science states that such a thing is impossible anyway: once the spark disperses, it’s _gone,_ no coming back. No one can prove the Afterspark is real, and if it isn’t then sparks are still just coalesced electrical energy, plasma and data. Once one dies, it probably just joins with the energy flow of the universe again. It’s highly likely that there’s nothing after death.

Still, the idea speaks to him somewhere deep inside that he tries to ignore. Rung is a mech of science and psychology, not pseudoscience and parapsychology. Religion is interesting in as far as it affects society and culture. It has uses for bringing comfort to his more spiritually-inclined patients.

Rung tells himself he isn’t spiritual, and for the most part he isn’t. Organised religion and state-endorsed use of it to control the masses who just want to believe in something _more_ is very much not his thing. But. There’s a part of him, deep in his spark, that resonates with some of the words, some of the sayings, some of the chants and the songs and the values they express.

He doesn’t let himself think about it too hard. Rung doesn’t believe in Primus.)

So, anyway, strange luck. Rung gets up from things that have others greying on the ground, and every time it shakes him. He thinks that he’s seen more corpses than many, more dead frames of people he knew, if only in passing, a familiar face in the corridor that never recognised his.

It stands to reason, therefore, that Rung is not unfamiliar with the sight of a med-bay ceiling, the smell of disinfectants and sanitisers, the vague lingering taste in the mouth of spilt energon and burnt wiring, the too-bright lights piercing his optics from above as he onlines them, the lone survivor once again.

Rung is _sick_ of being the only one alive.

–

Rung hopes – hopes against _hope –_ that the _Lost Light_ will be different than all the rest.

Sure, the quantum engines backfired during take-off, and, yes, some people died, which is always a tragedy, but – he’s alive, and so is most of the crew. The spark-eater thing was new, but that danger has passed now, and there’s a not-insignificant part of Rung that is more than a little intrigued.

Spark-eaters _were_ myth and legend, a scary tale told to entertain. There are many such tales, all with very interesting influences on the cultural psyche, and now Rung has proof that at least one of them has some sort of fact in its centre, so why not more? He’s made a lifetime of work in studying people – psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology – and a _real spark-eater_ is the type of thing that has his processor’s gears turning over and over, thinking of how much old stories affect society, how common themes and plots and archetypes inform so much of the subconscious perception, how determined the Functionists were to stamp such things out…

There’s things here to be followed up on, but to be honest Rung is too busy to do more than scrawl down bullet-point ideas in a data-pad as they come to him. He’s the only therapist aboard the _Lost Light,_ due to the sheer lack of them amongst the survivors of the war who came back to Cybertron before launch, and being the on-call counsellor for nearly two-hundred mecha, the vast majority of whom are veterans, is – a lot, to say the least. Rung feels like he needs ten more hands and ten more optics and ten more mouths, and, while he’s at it, ten more hours in the cycle to be able to give everyone the attention they need and deserve.

Rung feels a little guilty for sometimes being thankful that a lot of the crew are taking the _repress_ approach while he’s settling into his office and role. They _need help,_ and they’re not reaching out, but Rung only has so much energy to give, and – it’s a complicated situation. He hopes that it will calm down soon, will reach a type of equilibrium where he can have a more standard schedule and help more people that way by having drop-in hours for the mecha who are not in need of immediate structured appointments, but maybe need the occasional space and time to just – talk.

His work keeps him busy, but there are times when his knowledge and skill is needed outside of his office: Rodimus – to his credit – doesn’t call for Rung’s aid if it isn’t needed, knowing how busy Rung is, but sometimes the away teams, on whatever strange adventure they’re having now, require someone with knowledge of psychology and trauma to help with whatever situation they’ve ended up in. On those days, Rung often spends hours on the other end of a comm, speaking advice into Rodimus’ audio as the captain navigates often-horrifying situations and renders aid to sentients of all kinds whenever they need help.

It’s one of the things Rung quietly loves about Rodimus – that yearning to reach out and _help._ Rodimus isn’t very good at regulating his own energy, though, giving more than he has to other people. It’s a noble reason, for certain, but it isn’t good for him in the long run, and that’s what Rung’s here to help with. _Delegation,_ he counsels his captain, often. _Magnus is more than capable of getting a system up and running. Trust in your crew. Go get some recharge and come back to the situation in a few hours._

(Rodimus is a bright light, a guiding light, and he makes mistakes but he _admits_ to them, _learns_ from them, _resolves to do better._ In a leader, there’s nothing more dangerous than one who cannot learn. In a leader, there is a need for a vision, for a charisma, for a strong moral centre but the practicality to temper it. A leader needs to be able to lean on his advisors, and Rodimus has friends who love him and will still not hesitate to call him out for mistakes. He’s a good Prime – the best one Rung has ever seen, of the type that Cybertron has long forgotten.

Rung doesn’t believe in Primus, but if it were _he_ who had control of the Matrix, then he would have chosen Rodimus as well.)

These trips – out there in the universe, helping people on their quest, and some would complain that they’re not focusing on what they’re supposed to be doing, but Rung agrees with Rodimus that if they can help they should and that it _does_ feel good to just help without having to negotiate a price for the aid of the Autobots – do not always go to plan, however. Sometimes, Rung needs to be there in person.

And – Rung is not a combatant, not in the way the others are. Oh, he can fire a blaster, though he hates doing so beyond words, but he’s spent the war behind the lines, trying to shore up the mental health of those who go out to fight and die. He is not weathered by the battlefields in the same way as many of his compatriots, though he has seen horrors that he wishes never were.

(There are no _good guys_ in war.)

–

Rung wakes up to that awful, familiar sight: too-bright lights, white ceiling (it’s always white), scent of disinfectants and sanitisers, the taste of spilt energon and burnt wires on his glossa. The med-bay, once again.

“You,” Ratchet says, looming over Rung, “must have been blessed by Primus himself.”

Rung groans. His vocaliser clicks online after a moment of lag. “Ratchet?”

Then the pain hits him, bowling him over like a tidal wave, even through the haze of the heavy-duty pain dampening chips he must be under. Rung grimaces, and even that movement of his faceplates hurts like hell.

“Don’t move,” Ratchet snaps. Rung obligingly doesn’t. Ratchet wanders out of his immediate visual feed – Rung is not stupid enough to turn his head to try and follow him – and there’s the sound of him fiddling with something, probably cords and monitors.

Ratchet comes back after a couple of minutes, and Rung twitches a little at the sight of the syringe in his hand. _Ack._ Cybertronians don’t often need liquids injected into their lines during medical care the way organic races do, but it _does_ happen sometimes.

“What happened?” Rung croaks out, trying not to move his mouth too much.

“A damn catastrophe is what happened,” Ratchet grumbles. He gestures with his free hand outwards, presumably indicating the rest of the med-bay. “Half the away team’s here,” he says, leaning down and taking Rung’s arm in a more gentle grip than his tone would suggest, sliding back the panels to get the the nearest fuel line. “And don’t worry about your fragmented memory files,” he adds on, “they’re an effect of the blast you all got hit with.”

“Where were we?” Rung asks. The needle going into his lines doesn’t do more than pinch slightly, Ratchet too experienced for the process to be anything less than smooth.

“Some Primus-forsaken quarter of the Linkho System,” Ratchet grumbles. “We answered an SOS - you know how Rodimus is - got down on the ground and found that the pirates that were terrorising the colony had memory-altering weapons. You got called down to help encourage the repressed memories of some of the residents to resurface in a controlled and humane manner.”

“And I suppose the pirates came back?” Rung extrapolates.

“Got it in one,” Ratchet answers, returning Rung’s arm panel to its usual configuration. “We think they had some funders with deep subspaces – the Black Block Consortia or something like that. They had some nasty weapons to go with their memory-altering laser beams – that’s why you feel like slag, by the way.”

“Did we lose anyone?” Rung asks quietly, his frame growing heavy as the pain lifts, numbness spreading from his arm and creeping through his lines.

“No,” Ratchet says, face softer than a moment ago. “Well. Nearly. But Rodimus is going to be okay – I’m keeping him sedated for now. Kid won’t rest the way he should, otherwise. Magnus has got command for the next few days.”

“Bad?” Rung says. He doesn’t like the thought of Rodimus being injured so badly he has to be in the med-bay for days. Their kind are quick to bounce back, especially in comparison to other races.

“Worse,” Ratchet says, and there’s that tightness of frustration around his optics. Rung recalls that Ratchet has known Rodimus for a long time, and even if they don’t always get along, there’s something to be said for the comradeship of those who survived together in high-mortality units.

“Why, thank Primus, then,” Rung says, his voice and the angle of his slight smile inviting Ratchet – whom he knows decries religion with all the fervour of someone who wants so desperately to believe in greater things but is constantly let down by reality – to share the joke.

True to expectation, Ratchet snorts. “Thank Primus indeed,” he replies. “If he don’t look after his Prime then what hope have the rest of us got?”

Rung chuckles as his visual feed begins to blur at the edges, feeling recharge start to claim him. “I don’t think constantly landing him in an emergency room is exactly _looking after.”_

“Of course it is,” Ratchet says instantly. “Why else would _I_ be on this sorry ship if not by divine mandate to pull Rodimus out of whatever fire he plunges into?”

Rung lets out a coughing laugh as his vocaliser shuts down and he falls back into a soft dark place with no pain. He’s glad that someone as no-nonsense as Ratchet is around – it’s always good when the officer in charge of physical health and the officer in charge of mental health get along. Like interlocking pieces of nature – both working in tandem helps everyone on board.

“Get some rest,” is the last thing he hears. “I’ve got it from here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE DRAMATIC IRONY IS STRONG IN THIS ONE. It's an important part of my personal Rung characterisation that he isn't very religious - on some level, he _knows_ that something's _wrong_ and it manifests as an instinct to avoid. 
> 
> Also, this turned out way more "character study" than originally intended, but I'm actually quite happy with it. It's definitely more "whump" in the sense of all that Rung is implying than what actually occurs on screen, but. There's a lot of thematic stuff happening in the background (memory alteration, myths having nuggets of truth, Rung being the "only one alive"...) Yeah, a lot to unpack. 
> 
> (Hm. I think that I've managed to write something that's better on the re-read than on the first one. Unintentional, but I know that I was definitely happier with this piece when I proof-read it than on the first way though. _*shrugs*_ Enjoy anyway!) 
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	30. Ignoring An Injury | IDW | Megatron

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: background war and war aftermath, referenced discrimination, implied off-screen violence, major character injury, referenced slavery, ongoing redemption arc.

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 30 : Now Where Did That Come From?**

**Wound Reveal | Ignoring An Injury | ~~Internal Organ Injury~~**

–

**IDW Megatron**

–

Usually, he keeps them folded away and tucked beneath his helmet.

Megatron rolled off the line in a Tarnian factory, built an energon miner and never meant to be anything more. 071-980 – his serial number – had been his designation until he’d chosen his own name – Megatron. _Mega,_ for the meaning of _great,_ and _tron_ for _electron._ Later, he changed it to _tron_ for _neutron._ For _bomb._

(Most mistook the name as _Megaton_ at first, but Megatron, for all that he is a low-caste miner, refuses to be named for his ability to haul around _tonnage.)_

Like most of the mecha built for the same function, Megatron has a sensor crest of helm fins used for extending his range and aiding him when down in the dark below, literally slaving away amongst the rock and dust for precious energon crystals buried in veins so deep he sometimes doesn’t see the surface for months at a time.

On the upper levels there are strip lights, but there’s no ore remaining there, all of it mined out millennia before Megatron’s spark was placed in its standard frame and he was sent down below. The companies who own the miners – and they are _owned,_ make no mistake about that – are cheap and frugal. They don’t waste shanix trailing electricity cables and delicate lights down that far when the sensor crests or horns of their labourers work well enough. Megatron has never known any different, and doesn’t think to complain – in fact, up above, the world is almost _too_ bright, for those first few hours, before his optics adjust.

Up on the surface, he folds and tucks the crest away underneath his helmet, the same way all the other miners do, a move he copied off them while still new, fresh from his first descent. Restricting his sensors had unnerved him, and the helmet is hardly comfortable, but it had needed to be done. The helm fins are – sensitive. A weak point on his otherwise-sturdy frame. Most don’t pick fights with miners and labourers of Megatron’s stature, but why risk it? The enforcers would never take Megatron’s side, after all. To them, he’s less than the dirt and rubble they pile him under.

_Disposable._

So Megatron hides his crest, conforms silently with all the rest, and restrains the urge to bring it out, walk with those sensors touching real above-ground air. He wants to – wants to walk openly and unafraid like he wants to own an entire shelf full of data-pads and wants to go to medical school and learn how to heal with his huge hands not meant for such delicate functions and tasks but what does that matter in comparison to how much he _wants to learn how – ?_

Wants and wishes and dreams burn like a fire in his chest, a low smouldering. The hottest part of the fire is the piece of coal at the very centre, not the brighter flames. He doesn’t know it yet, but that burning desire will sit in the pit of his chest for aeons, will light up and spread beyond the dark mine of its origin. It will be both guiding beacon and furious wildfire, and people will know his name from one end of the universe to the other.

But that comes later.

–

Megatron writes poetry, writes essays, and people read them, and people begin to have the words to describe their own suffering.

Megatron makes speeches, organises rallies, and people listen to him, people agree with him, and people begin to band together under one banner, one idea: _we_ _are people too._

(Megatron had never had any doubt of his own personhood, but in a world that regards certain mecha as barely-sentient, as alive to perform a singular function, as just another cog in the great machine… some internalisation of their filthy rhetoric is perhaps to be expected. Megatron tailors his words to dig in and uproot those deep dark thoughts, drag them out into the light and expose them for the flawed chains they really are.

Most even thank him for it.)

Megatron gathers an army and goes to war. Underneath his upgraded battle armour, his sensor crest twitches, still restrained, and the miner’s symbols – ones wishing good fortune, wishing accurate swings of the pickaxe, warding off shaft collapses, warding off the ever-watchful optics of the supervisors and their electrical-prods – painted on it by Terminus, who taught him their quiet power, fade away ‘til they can barely be seen, smudges of yellow-gold on the grey plating.

The helmet is off so little he barely notices.

–

Here is a small lesson on basic Cybertronian anatomy: sensory appendages – wings, horns, crests, and all manner of other things in all shapes and sizes, as befitting of such a changeable race – are, by nature, _sensitive._

Not all are particularly _delicate –_ wings have to be able to stand up to flight, to give but one example – but most of the smaller ones are. Crests, antennae, finials… small, thin, or both. Loaded with sensors and relays and receptors – and with them fragile, due to the lesser amount of solid metal in their make-up.

Reinforcing such appendages is finicky – mecha who own them are fussy about them. And why wouldn’t they be? Those appendages make up a whole sense for them – it’s like asking someone if they would like to walk around blindfolded. Yes, some light will filter through, but the range of vision has just been greatly reduced.

So most go the route Megatron takes: hiding them away beneath helmets or specially-made plating, rather than directly reinforcing the limbs. The best of both worlds, as it were.

–

Another fact about Cybertronian anatomy: long-term physical restriction on sensor-heavy appendages _hurts._ No, not just hurts, has _long-term consequences._

Armour chafes with friction, appendages meant to flex and move lock up and ache as they are forced to be still, and sensors get damaged through a mix of both.

Megatron’s had his crest folded away for the better part of four million years. They stopped hurting millennia ago – he can’t feel anything but numbness from them now.

–

Megatron shows only Terminus, in that other, hideous world, his helm crest. Terminus winces at the sight, his fingers ghosting across them with the barest touch, but even that causes Megatron pain.

Their medical supplies are limited, and desperately needed for far more important things. Megatron puts his helmet back on and the matter out of mind.

Later, after the trial, after Rodimus convinces them all to give Megatron his chance to make amends and the _Lost Light_ sets off again, this time a galactic outreach vessel, he still doesn’t take it off. Terminus – before his death, his _second_ death, and the second time Megatron had to mourn him – had traced the old symbols, had shown – shown _again –_ Megatron his own, refreshing his memory.

Megatron has not yet repainted them on, but – perhaps, in the future, when he finds someone he can show them to, someone he can trust with this little piece of history and culture that so few now remember, he will. Superstitious and uneducated, many would scorn the pictograms, but. But they _mean something._ Megatron had just – forgotten.

–

“Good, you’re online,” Ratchet says brusquely as Megatron’s optics flicker on, his frame aching like he’s been on a battlefield for weeks. “Want to tell me what this slag is?”

“What slag?” Megatron asks, grimacing, carefully sitting up. His HUD is reading all-clear, though there’s still the remaining swiftly-disintegrating code of a pain dampening chip lingering in his systems. He still hasn’t yet told the medical team of his resistance to the standard chips after so long of getting slagged and repaired. Ratchet will hit the roof and keep on going when he finally does, but Megatron’s not the kind to willingly reveal any potential weakness even now.

Ratchet turns and picks something up from a side-table. Even battered to the Pit and back, with a huge crack splitting it nearly in half, Megatron recognises the sight of his helmet.

“… Oh,” he says. Belatedly, he feels the stuttering flexes of his crest fins, their mobility hampered as they try to flare out in surprise. Even through the partial disconnect of the pain dampening chip, this hurts.

“Yes,” Ratchet growls. _“Oh.”_

–

Ratchet says a fair bit more than that, but Megatron takes a page from Rodimus’ book and just kind of tunes most of it out. It’s mostly angry bluster, anyway – does he know what stupidity it is to leave his crest restrained for long periods of time, is he an idiot for not coming to the medics, blah blah blah.

Ratchet’s venting steam – likely at least part of his anger is self-recriminatory, since he’s old enough to know that Megatron’s build class was constructed with such sensory appendages and he himself hadn’t thought to ask about Megatron’s crest – and Megatron lets him. Ratchet will get to the real point of this soon enough, and Megatron has had to endure worse.

Finally, Ratchet finishes grumping and instead jabs questions at Megatron regarding the state of his sensor crest:

“Were you built with it?” he asks first.

“Yes,” Megatron says.

Ratchet narrows his optics. “How long have you had that helmet?”

“Since the beginning. It has undergone upgrades.” Megatron meets Ratchet’s optics steadily, refusing to acknowledge the way his crest tries to twitch nervously.

“Does this hurt?” Ratchet asks, taking hold of one of the helm fins between two fingers and slowly pulling to slide the segmented piece out farther from the housing. It’s a gentle touch, really, but –

“ _Ah!”_ Megatron grits his denta, then says shortly, “Yes.”

“Good. It should.” Ratchet lets go, the piece half slides back into itself. Megatron has four helm fins, and each have two segments: the wider primary piece at the base and the secondary thinner piece that slots inside the first when retracted. The second one has the most sensors, though the first is hardly lacking. “Means the sensors aren’t entirely dead. How often did you fold it away?”

“Most of the time,” Megatron admits, though the truth is closer to _nearly all the time._ He hadn’t – even in the midst of his warships, or the seat of his power in Decepticon territory, he had never felt safe enough to casually remove the helmet, even in the privacy of his own quarters.

“Fragging idiot,” Ratchet snorts. “How long has it been mostly numb?” he asks shrewdly.

“Few millennia – maybe eight or nine?” Megatron shrugs, as though it isn’t a big deal, as though it didn’t panic him when he first realised the loss of sense and feeling. “I can’t recall the exact details – sensation faded slowly.”

“You have no idea how lucky you are that they’re still recoverable,” Ratchet says, clipped, optics assessing. He turns away and grabs a small tin from next to the broken helmet. He offers it to Megatron. “Here.”

Megatron takes it. “What is it?”

“Nanite gel,” Ratchet says. “Apply it to the crest in a thick layer twice daily – it should help aid your self-repair in regenerating the sensors you lost. Do not – I repeat _do not –_ retract your helm fins until I clear you to. Else you really will lose them.”

“What about my helmet?” Megatron asks, because he’s never been without it in all of his functioning, and the thought doesn’t thrill him now. It’s not – it’s hardly a safety blanket, but there is a certain comfort in familiarity, and Megatron wants it back. If nothing else, it’ll prevent some enterprising mecha from taking it and – Primus, probably _selling it_ or something. Megatron can imagine the listing now: _Lord Megatron’s Helmet!! Genuine!!!_ or some slag like that. There’s – to his own quiet discomfort – no shortage of people who would probably buy it.

“I’ll fix it up, pad it more,” Ratchet replies, and Megatron – relaxes. Ratchet narrows his optics. “But you’re not getting it back ‘til I’m certain you’re not about to jam it on your head and ruin all the work done so far.”

“Acceptable,” Megatron says. He still doesn’t want to walk around exposed for the next however-long, but that helmet won’t leave Ratchet’s care. He’ll get it back.

“Go on, get,” Ratchet says, waving a hand towards the door. “Come back in a week to get another scan – I’ll likely be able to project a more accurate recovery time then from how far your sensors have come.”

“I will,” Megatron replies as he leaves the room, the door swishing shut behind him. The corridor is empty – it must be late in the cycle.

Megatron treks all the way back to his hab suite. He passes only a couple of mecha in the halls, and they stare at his crest, but –

Once, Megatron had fantasised about walking open and free, unafraid. He’s nervous now, but fear will _not_ make him cower, not anymore. He keeps his head held high, his crest flared as wide as the damaged fins will go. He refuses to feel shame for how he was built, for the fins that once marked him as a disposable labourer.

So he lets them stare. He lets them _see._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys, remember that series of _literally three panels_ that showed Megatron taking off his helmet to reveal these fins and then they _never showed them again?_ Let's talk about that.
> 
> As per usual, the second half of this chapter is jumping ship off of my fic _Atonement_ regarding the post-canon state of affairs. It can be found [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25249054).
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


	31. Left For Dead | SG G1 | Hot Rod + Galvatron + Optimus Prime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: background war, implied/referenced torture, whipping, left for dead, referenced execution, referenced deaths, evil god and his prophet at it again, implied mind break/mind control/non-consensual mental conditioning, betrayal, emotional abuse, physical abuse, it's Shattered Glass guys you know the game. Hopeful ending.
> 
> ***This instalment can be read as occurring in the same verse as No. 24 (Forced Mutism) which is the other Shattered Glass instalment in this collection, but it is not necessary to read them both to enjoy.**

**Whumptober 2020**

**No. 31 : Today’s Special: Torture**

**~~Experiment~~ | Whipped | Left For Dead**

–

**SG G1 Hot Rod + Galvatron + Optimus Prime**

–

Hot Rod’s frame gives one last muted spasm before falling entirely limp, hanging like a corpse in the plasma chains. He isn’t a corpse – not _yet –_ but the intent of his – _old_ master, he has to remember that – is there.

He thinks of begging again, but – Optimus despises beggars, and Hot Rod’s pride won’t let him try a second time. It wouldn’t make a difference anyway: Hot Rod isn’t leaving Torque Peak alive, and he knew it the instant Optimus had him dragged up here bound with more chains and cuffs than any before him. A necessary precaution: Hot Rod had long been the Prime’s chosen enforcer, and such a position is not given to just _anyone._

“You’ve become weak,” Optimus says, sounding just so _disappointed_ that millions of years of conditioning have Hot Rod nearly spilling out frantic apologies, desperate for another chance to prove himself and his loyalty, frame jerking in place and ember flickering in fear and horror. He manages to mute his vocaliser before the words come out: despite everything, he is not sorry.

Hot Rod swallows, his intake juddering in the back of his throat. He can taste energon on his glossa, the familiar bittersweet taste of the type that has already been processed through a frame’s systems and is more _blood_ than _fuel._ He raises his heavy neck, ignoring the way even that tiny movement aggravates his back, and looks at Optimus Prime dead in the optic. “I am stronger now than I’ve ever been,” he rasps out through his damaged vocaliser.

“Hot Rod,” Optimus says, mournful if not for the way his optics are too bright with a fervour that Hot Rod has seen many a time in the dungeons below: Optimus _adores_ others’ pain. “Tell me, what happened? You used to be so loyal, so true. You stood by my side for millions of years – why do you turn away now?”

Hot Rod struggles to put his answer into words. He has a lot of things to say – too many thoughts and feelings crammed into his mind to be able to pull them together into something coherent – and he’s not sure how many words he can make his vocaliser spit out before it fails on him. He’s not sure how long he has to speak. “You hurt me,” is what ends up coming out first, and it’s no less true for its sheer understatement.

Optimus tilts his head to the side. Between them, the gaping expanse of millions of years of pain and torture stretches. Hot Rod had never turned away before now, no matter the abuses heaped upon his frame, his mind, his ember. “Is that it?”

“No,” Hot Rod corrects. “Before – before the war. You _hurt me._ You took me down there, into the dark. You _twisted me._ I came out different… I want my life back.”

“I saved you,” Optimus says gently, and it’s a line that he has repeated time and time again for millennia. Even now, there is a part of Hot Rod that believes him. “I remade you, better than before. Have I not proven my care for you?” He comes closer, setting aside the vibro-whip, taking Hot Rod’s face in his hands. One of his thumbs pressing against Hot Rod's lower lip. “Love is pain, Hot Rod. You know that. I _saved you.”_

“You killed me,” Hot Rod whispers.

Optimus stills. His red optics bore into Hot Rod’s, and Hot Rod doesn’t back down the way he’s done countless times before. Staring back, he feels his ember’s flickers become uneven in their frequency – stories seem full of how standing up to your abuser and saying _no more_ means that they no longer hold sway over you, that you can look them in their optics and feel nothing at the sight of the rage that once had you cowering, but – Hot Rod’s still frightened, still _terrified._

Optimus’ judgemental optics have not decreased in their power at all… Hot Rod just has other things to cling onto in the face of them, a lone rock in the stormy Rust Sea. The waves still batter and the wind still howls and the darkness is still just as all-encompassing… But there’s a jutting rock he’s gripping onto with all his might, and a light in the distance that Hot Rod wants to make his way to. It’s dim, blinking in and out of sight in the acid rain, but – there is a strength to be found, in simply knowing that the light is there, that he is not alone anymore, drowning.

Optimus lets go of his face, stepping away, and maybe Hot Rod should hold his head up and stare after him, but he instead lets it fall, obscuring his expression from Optimus’ view. He takes the chance to mentally gather his strength again, shore up the courage that has carried him this far. He stares down at the energon-stained rocks below, small pools caught in their rough surfaces, still filling from what’s dripping from his own frame to join the many that have bled out their life here on Torque Peak, where Optimus executes Autobots who step too far out of line, before he raises his head again.

“I refuse,” Hot Rod whispers to Optimus. “I will not be your – your _slave_ any longer.” He works his jaw for a brief moment, trying to find the words, but there’s only a mess of contradicting statements in his mind that he feels he needs to say: “I hate you. I love you. I fear you, and I crave your approval. I hate that you’ve done this to me, and I still want to never leave your side. You _made me._ I can’t be who I was before. But I can become someone new.”

“You don’t have to do this, Hot Rod,” Optimus reminds him. “It is not too late. I have mercy.”

The offer is – Hot Rod would be a liar if he said it wasn’t tempting, if he said he didn’t put serious thought into taking it, accepting the punishment, folding himself back down into conformity… But – “I have gone too far beyond my previous restraints,” he whispers. “I cannot bend to fit them again.”

“I can break you back into shape,” Optimus says, and he doesn’t even say it like a threat. He says it like a reassurance. “You can be my Hot Rod again.”

“No,” Hot Rod says, and this time he _glares._ “You don’t own me – you are not my _master._ Not anymore.”

Optimus pauses, waits, but Hot Rod doesn’t cower back again, though he wants to, and he doesn’t retract the statement. After a moment, Optimus seems to realise that, yes, Hot Rod really means it this time.

“… As you wish,” Optimus says, turning away. “Hear this, then, you who was once Hot Rod; Primus’ mercy is vast. You will die here, an Autobot, in memory and honour of your service.” He sounds magnanimous, and, again, even now, Hot Rod _understands_ that mercy: appreciates it, even, though its form is distorted and strange to any non-Autobot.

He doesn’t thank him, though.

Optimus descends down the steep steps from Torque Peak, long since cut into the cliff-side, leaving Hot Rod alone on the exposed heights to die. Hot Rod doesn’t call out after him.

–

Torque Peak looks like this: there is a roughly-circular expanse carved into the dense copper-rich stone at the very top of what was once a sheer and sharp mountain rising lonely outside of Iacon, between the capital of Cybertron and Crystal City to the west. Also carved are the steps leading up from the long-held Autobot fortress that clings to the base below, partially inside the mountain, spires and gun turrets climbing upwards like claws, the peak spearing into the sky above, optic-catching from all directions as Cybertron’s distant sun lights it up a rusty red.

Upon this expanse: one thick durasteel post, flanked on either side by two thinner ones, plasma chains coiled around it and draping from it to the rings on the two adjacent posts. Here is where a mech is strung up, tortured – usually whipped – and left to bleed out and die, or else fall victim to the harsh sonic winds that cut like blades up this high, tearing apart the frame over time, or perhaps an opportunistic mechanimal scavenger, desperate in its rare survival, sighting fuel in their starved world.

Here is where Optimus Prime executes Autobots. Not Decepticons, not Autobot traitors, just _Autobots._ The Prime can decide that death is the appropriate response for an infraction without the crime being betrayal, after all. Truly, Hot Rod should not be up here, but – he will die and be remembered as an Autobot, and. He’s not quite sure how he feels about that.

“I don’t regret it,” Hot Rod murmurs to himself, alone up there, hanging in the chains. His whole frame hurts, and the wind is beginning to pick up now, dragging agonisingly over the rips the vibro-whip left on his back, his spoiler wings in shreds, tugging at the edges, pulling them wider with sprayed drips. He shutters his optics. “I could never regret you.”

It’s the truth, hidden deep down beneath all his doubt and fear. As he speaks it, he listens to its power as it sounds in the air. He’s even a little surprised: not until right here, right now, did he ever think that he wouldn’t regret his choices, no matter how much pain it has brought him.

“Heh,” Hot Rod snorts softly. He lets a pained smile spread across his face – there’s no one here to see, so what does it matter? “Seems I liked you more than even I thought.”

(Even now he cannot bring himself to utter the word _love._ That word has been tainted for him.

But is _love_ necessary? Hot Rod had _liked,_ had _respected,_ and had _been respected_ in return. You don’t have to love someone to respect them. You don’t have to love someone to offer aid, to say _I am here to help,_ to help them get their pedes under them again.

Hot Rod would term it _adoration,_ or _sentimentality,_ or perhaps even _you are my weakness._ He no longer associates love with comfort – only with pain.

But – make no mistake – Hot Rod had loved, had _been loved._ _)_

Cybertron turns on its axis and night comes in, creeping through the sky with shadowy tendrils. The darkness is Primus’ domain, after all, and a hush falls upon the planet, unnatural to any who are not born of dark gods. There are stars above, winking in and out, all distant. Cybertron is a cold planet, orbiting a lone star, its sun, on the very outer edges of its gravity field.

In the darkness, in that hush that is deeply entrenched into their culture to not disturb, comes a voice: “Hot Rod?”

Hot Rod raises his head from where he was gazing listlessly at the softly-shining pools of energon below. That’s – no, it can’t be. He must be dreaming. And, yet, he still calls out, “… Galvatron?”

If it is a dream, it’s the nicest one Hot Rod has ever had. Galvatron, his whites and blues soft like light on mist in the shine of the stars above, pulls himself up the edge of the plateau. He does not belong in the darkness: his shape does not move like a shadowed wraith the way Hot Rod knows his own does. Is that his god? His Lord of Light, Unicron?

Galvatron comes up to him, large and gentle, and his optics shine a hue of blue that Hot Rod has never seen on anyone else. His helm has a crown of sensory horns, and not even Optimus Prime looks as much like an emperor as Galvatron does, though the Decepticon would grimace to hear such words, however they were intended.

“I’ve got you, Hot Rod,” Galvatron murmurs as he rattles the plasma chains holding Hot Rod captive, loosening them. Hot Rod falls into his grasp, his slight weight nothing for the Decepticon leader to bear. “We’re going home.”

“Are you real?” Hot Rod asks, even as he presses his face into his lover’s chest-plates, shutters his optics to focus on the pulsing of his ember. _Forbidden,_ long conditioning tells him insistently, but with Galvatron all of the rules of the world seemed to change, and sometimes Hot Rod still finds that unnerving and frightening, but sometimes he likes saying and doing things he would never be allowed to do or to say amongst his own side.

Or – _not_ his own side, but… Hot Rod swallows, tastes energon, but that’s a taste that has followed him into dreams before, and – if this is the last thing his processor is conjuring up before he dies, then. It’s a good dream.

Galvatron holds Hot Rod close. “Yes,” he whispers. “I am real. This is real. _You_ are real.” He’s careful with how he positions his hands, trying to avoid aggravating Hot Rod’s injuries, and that’s the type of thoughtless kindness that Hot Rod still finds strange, but – not unwelcome.

“I want to be real,” Hot Rod says into Galvatron’s neck. “I want to – to be more than the Prime’s Enforcer.”

“You will be,” Galvatron assures him, as he activates his anti-gravity mods and rises into the night, aiming for the stars. “I swear it, Hot Rod. You will be great.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap, everyone! Thank you for reading this collection, and I wish you all the best. Please don't hesitate to leave kudos and comments, even on past chapters, since I truly do read and appreciate every single one! 
> 
> (Side note: oh good lord I am _never doing this again_. I very much enjoyed myself, and I acknowledge that any stress brought about by setting myself a word count was, in fact, my own damn fault, but while I am very happy to have had this experience, I am _not_ going to embark on a repeat. 31 prompts is just too many, though week-long challenges are probably still on the table.) 
> 
> Thank you and goodbye ❤
> 
> The full list of Whumptober 2020 prompts can be found [here](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com/post/628055505485561856/whumptober-2020-updated).
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


End file.
